Coop

Summary

The project will design and implement a Persistent Distributed Store (PDS) that will facilitate the performance of cooperative tasks based on the sharing of data. The PDS will provide a software bus that applications will use to share and store information in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. Some collaborative office applications will be run over the PDS. Requirements for the PDS will be derived from the characteristics of work in office systems.

Objectives

To provide high interactive performance and availability by replicating objects at their point of use; to provide flexible replica consistency protocols and long cooperative transactions suitable for office applications; to allow applications to continue to run in spite of the failure of processes or communication; to provide security and confidentiality of data; to support access from mobile and disconnected hosts. The partners will collaborate on a common implementation, which is expected to be very easy to use, and will be made available to all interested parties.

Relevance

The project will disseminate to industry recent research in distributed shared memory and its integration with fault tolerance and security in the form of a PDS that manages shared objects for C and C++ and provides a platform for cooperative applications, producing better performance and more flexible sharing of data than the client-server model.

The effectiveness the PDS will be demonstrated by porting or adapting a set of distributed office applications. This project will use the office automation product Elenix, built and commercialized by a Portuguese software company SMD SA, with the goal of exploring novel mechanisms and functionalities that could enhance and make evolve the product. The use of this product and the cooperation with this company will improve the competitiveness of the Portuguese industry. The industrial partner SMD will provide a test site, enabling it to be used for real projects and to be demonstrated to the IT industry showing its potential for application in similar fields of engineering.

Approach

The proposal combines fundamental research with simulation, implementation, and measurement. Results are expected in the area of scalable, distributed algorithms for coherence, fault tolerance, security, mobile and disconnected operation and their integration.

The research will be organized in the following related tasks, each of which is led by one of the partners:

• Produce a distributed shared memory with a variety of policies for coherence of object replicas, to satisfy the requirements for cooperative applications.
• Provide fault tolerance in the PDS by integrating checkpointing with a transaction mechanism.
• Provide mechanisms in the PDS for fine grain access control of objects and authentication of principals. Task-specific security specifications will be used to define access rights.
• Port and adapt some applications of Elenix to run over the PDS. - An additional task is concerned with the integration of the PDS and its dissemination.

Check out the Overview Slides in PDF.

Sponsoring bodies: FCT

Coordinator: Paulo Guedes

Partners: INESC-ID, University of Minho and SMD SA.

Homepage: N/A