The Road to a more Configurable and Adaptive Communication and
Coordination Support.
Luís Rodrigues
Selected section of this report were published in the Proceedings of
the 9th Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing
Systems. San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 2003.
Abstract
The implementation of distributed applications is an increasingly
complex task. Not only the users require new and more complex
functionalities but these have to be provided considering a large
set of non-functional requirements such as high performance,
fault-tolerance, timeliness, etc. Therefore, communication and
coordination services, offered at the operating system or middleware
level, assume a fundamental role in the development of efficient and
robust software. This paper discusses the problem of designing and
implementing the communication and coordination support for
distributed applications. One way to implement these services is to
rely on application-specific solutions, in an attempt to obtain the
best performance possible. In this paper, we champion a different
approach that consists in supporting adaptation, configuration and
composition at all levels of the system development, namely:
i) abstractions; ii) algorithms and; iii)
implementations. Using different examples we show that this approach
allows to obtain solutions that are generic, re-usable and
efficient.
Also available extended report (gzip postscript), (pdf).
Luís Rodrigues