Robust Large-Scale Distributed Systems

Cooperative and peer-to-peer services both seek to provide a way to scale services beyond what can be provided by even a high-end server machine. Cooperative services do this by treating a service as a parallel program and then running the program across a cluster of machines. Key challenges include rearchitecting services not only to provide good performance by balancing parallelism and locality but also to ensure good reliability and simple management. Peer-to-peer services go further and enlist machines controlled by different users to collectively provide a service to each other. In addition to the problems of cooperative services, peer-to-peer services have to cope with new issues of trust that arise when a service runs across machines spanning multiple administrative domains with limited trust or competing interests. Some highlights of this stream of work include