this paper is part of the Globe Project (Globe stands for GLobal Object Based Environment) . The goal of this project is the design and implementation of a wide area distributed system that provides a convenient programming abstraction and full transparency. The main contribution of this paper is the description of a new system for distributed shared objects. In contrast to other systems, the implementation of distribution, consistency, and replication of state is completely encapsulated in a distributed shared object. This allows for object-specific solutions, and provides the right mechanism for building efficient and truly scalable systems. 2 Problems to be Solved

Locating mobile objects in a worldwide system requires a scalable location service. An object can be a telephone or a notebook computer, but also a software or data object, such as a file or an electronic document. Our service strictly separates an object's name from the addresses where it can be contacted. This is done by introducing a location-independent object handle. An object's name is bound to its unique object handle, which, in turn, is mapped to the addresses where the object can be contacted. To locate an object, we need only its object handle. We present a scalable location service based on a worldwide distributed search tree that adapts dynamically to an object's migration pattern to optimize lookups and updates.

In a large-scale information system such as a digital library or the web, a set of distributed caches can improve their effectiveness by coordinating their data placement decisions. In this paper, we examine the design space for cooperative placement and replacement algorithms. Our main focus is on the placement algorithms, which attempt to solve the following problem: given a set of caches, the network distances between caches, and predictions of the access rates from each cache to a set of objects, determine where to place each object in order to minimize the average access cost. Replacement algorithms also attempt to minimize access cost, but they work by selecting which objects to evict when a cache miss occurs. Using simulation, we examine three practical cooperative placement algorithms including one that is provably close to optimal, and we compare these algorithms to the optimal placement algorithm and several cooperative and non-cooperative replacement algorithms. We draw fiv...

. Developing large-scale wide-area applications requires an infrastructure that is presently lacking entirely. Currently, applications have to be built on top of raw communication services, such as TCP connections. All additional services, including those for naming, replication, migration, persistence, fault tolerance, and security, have to be implemented for each application anew. Not only is this a waste of effort, it also makes interoperability between different applications difficult or even impossible. We present a novel, object-based framework for developing wide-area distributed applications. The framework is based on the concept of a distributed shared object, which has the characteristic feature that its state can be physically distributed across multiple machines at the same time. All implementation aspects, including communication protocols, replication strategies, and distribution and migration of state, are part of an object and are hidden behind its interface. The curren...

Consider a hierarchical network in which each node periodically issues a request for an object drawn from a fixed set of unit-size objects. Suppose further that the following conditions are satisfied: the frequency with which each node accesses each object is known; each node has a cache of known capacity; any cache can be accessed by any node; any request is satisfied by the closest node with a copy of the desired object, at a cost proportional to the distance between the accessing node and the closest copy. In such an environment, it is desirable to fill the available cache space with copies of objects in such a way that the average access cost is minimized. We provide both exact and approximate polynomial-time algorithms for this hierarchical placement problem. Our exact algorithm is based on a reduction to min-cost flow, and does not appear to be practical for large problem sizes. Thus we are motivated to search for a faster approximation algorithm. Our main result is a simple constant-factor approximation algorithm for the hierarchical placement problem that admits an efficient distributed implementation.

In this paper, we examine the bandwidth-constrained placement problem, focusing on trade-os appropriate for wide area network (WAN) environments. The goal is to place copies of objects at a collection of distributed caches to minimize expected access times from distributed clients to those objects subject to a maximum bandwidth constraint at each cache. We develop a simple algorithm to generate a bandwidth-constrained placement by hierarchically rening an initial per-cache greedy placement. We prove that this hierarchical algorithm generates a placement whose expected access time is within a constant factor of the optimal placement's expected access time. We then proceed to extend this algorithm to compute close to optimal placement strategies for dynamic environments.

This paper is concerned with compact routing schemes for arbitrary undirected networks in the name-independent model first introduced by Awerbuch, Bar-Noy, Linial and Peleg. A compact routing scheme that uses local routing tables of size Õ(n1/2), 1 O(log 2 n)-sized packet headers, and stretch bounded by 5 is obtained, where n is the number of nodes in the network. Alternative schemes reduce the packet header size to O(log n) at the cost of either increasing the stretch to 7 or increasing the table size to Õ(n2/3). For smaller table-size requirements, the ideas in these schemes are generalized to a scheme that uses O(log 2 n)-sized headers, Õ(k2 n 2/k)-sized tables, and achieves a stretch of min{1 + (k − 1)(2 k/2 − 2), 16k 2 − 8k}, improving the best previously-known name-independent scheme due to Awerbuch and Peleg. 1

Consider an arbitrary distributed network in which large numbers of objects are continuously being created, replicated, and destroyed. A basic problem arising in such an environment is that of organizing a distributed directory service for locating object copies. In this paper, we present a new data tracking scheme for locating nearby copies of objects in arbitrary distributed environments. Our tracking scheme supports ecient accesses to data objects while keeping the local memory overhead low. In particular, our tracking scheme achieves an expected polylog(n)- approximation in the cost of any access operation, for an arbitrary network. The memory overhead incurred by our scheme is O(polylog(n)) times the maximum number of objects stored at any node, with high probability. We also show that our tracking scheme adapts well to dynamic changes in the network. 1 College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, rraj@ccs.neu.edu. Supported by NSF CAREER award NSF CCR{9983901. 2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-5406, aricha@asu.edu. Supported in part by NSF CAREER Award CCR{9985284 and NSF Grant CCR{9900304. 3 Max-Planck-Institut f ur Informatik, Saarbr ucken, Germany. Supported in part by the IST Programme of the EU under contrac number IST-1999-14186 (ALCOM-FT) 4 Compaq Corporation, San Jose, CA, Gayathri.Vuppuluri@compaq.com. This work was done while the author was a graduate student at Arizona State University, supported in part by NSF CAREER Award CCR{9985284. 1

This paper presents compact roundtrip routing schemes with local tables of size Õ( √ n) and stretch 6 for any directed network with arbitrary edge weights; and with local tables of size Õ(ǫ−1 n 2/k) and stretch min((2 k/2 − 1)(k + ǫ),16k 2 + 8k − 8), for any directed network with polynomially-sized edges, both in the topology-independent node-name model. 1 These are the first topology-independent results that apply to routing in directed networks.

Probabilistic flooding (parameterized by a forwarding probability) has frequently been considered in the past, as a means of limiting the large message overhead associated with traditional (full) flooding approaches that are used to disseminate globally information in unstructured peer-topeer and other networks. A key challenge in using probabilistic flooding is the determination of the forwarding probability so that global network outreach is achieved while keeping the message overhead as low as possible. By showing that a probabilistic flooding network generated by applying probabilistic flooding to a connected random graph network can be bounded by properly parameterized random graph networks and invoking random graph theory results, bounds on the value of the forwarding probability are derived guaranteeing global network outreach with high probability, while significantly reducing the message overhead. Bounds on the average number of messages – as well as asymptotic expressions- and on the average time required to complete network outreach are also derived, illustrating the benefits of the properly parameterized probabilistic flooding scheme. 1.