Abstract

A Scalable Distributed Information Management System (SDIMS) that aggregates information about large-scale networked systems can serve as a basic building for a broad-range of large-scale distributed applications simplifying the design, development, and deployment of such services. In this document, we outline four key requirements such an aggregation system should satisfy to be useful as a general middleware building block – scalability with both nodes and data attributes, flexibility to accommodate broad range of services, administrative autonomy and isolation for availability and security, and robustness to reconfigurations in the system. We propose a new aggregation framework that leverages Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) and a new aggregation abstraction that builds on a previously proposed abstraction in Astrolabe. We also present details of several significant applications that we propose to build on top of SDIMS.

Citations