This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Increasingly, computation and storage are moving into a planetary cloud accessible across ever-widening Internet pipes. Unfortunately, asynchrony, failures, and heterogeneity make it difficult to harness available computing power and storage, with inherent tradeoffs in performance, data consistency, and availability. The goal of this research is to raise the level of abstraction for building planetary-scale services, in particular to: i) make fault tolerant and high-performance storage a baseline abstraction for a variety of services, and ii) simplify the process of building extensible and distributed data structures that match the requirements of a range of services. Taken together, this project has the potential to effect a qualitative shift in our ability to deploy next-generation high-performance and highly available network services. First, application developers will be able to leverage fault tolerant, locality-aware data storage as a given for their distributed applications. Second, the research will deliver primitives to ease the problem of deploying new distributed data structures. We will provide the abstractions to manage distribution, replications, and faults in these environments. The broader impacts of this project will include leveraging our infrastructure to conduct studies of large-scale service architectures, first in advanced graduate courses and later in undergraduate courses, and a public release of the replication and extensible data structure software underlying our work for research and educational purposes.
