NSF #0917056 Efficient and Reciprocal File Replication and Consistency Maintenance in Pervasive Distributed Computing (PI)

Advancements in technology over the past decade are leading to a promising future for pervasive distributed computing (PDC), where access to information and services is provided anytime and anywhere around the world. The proliferation of Internet-scale applications poses new challenges for how future file systems are designed and managed to enable this future. The difficulty of these challenges grows with the number of users and the intensity of the data, and is further compounded by the need to support replication and consistency. However, previous file replication and consistency maintenance approaches are not efficient enough to be scalable for PDC. These two issues are typically addressed separately, despite the significant interdependencies between them. This research addresses this issue through the development of a file management system with Efficient and Reciprocal file Replication and Consistency maintenance (ERRC). The ERRC system will incorporate swarm intelligence based file replication and coordinated multi-factor-oriented file replication algorithms to achieve high efficiency in both file replication and consistency maintenance. The system also contains self-adaptive file replication and consistency maintenance mechanism that allows each node to determine the need of file replication and consistency maintenance in a decentralized manner. Understanding and insight gained as a result of this project will be disseminated through technology transfer to industry partners, in addition to publication and software release channels. The multi-disciplinary nature of this research also lends itself to cross-disciplinary education and well-rounded training of students.