Date:February 11, 1999
Time: Noon
Place: Wean Hall 8220
Speaker: Mostafa Ammar, Georgia Institue of Technology
Multicasting and Anycasting: Two Techniques for Providing A Scalable Web Service
Abstract:
Networked services are at the heart of the on-going information revolution. As the demand for these services (particularly Web-style services) increases it becomes important for a service to be scalable. That is, a service provider should be able to handle a large number of users with low per-user cost and still maintain good user-perceived service quality. Our work considers two techniques for making a service scalable: 1) the use of group (or multicast) communication combined with request batching at the server and 2) the use of server replication. To illustrate our efforts investigating the first technique, we will discuss our work on the provision of highly scalable Web service using reliable and best-effort multicast communication. With the second technique, when a service is replicated to improve its scalability, the user is faced with the problem of determining the best server to access. We present an overview of our work on the design and implementation of the "anycasting" communication paradigm to support the server location function.
Bio:
Mostafa H. Ammar is Professor of Computer Science with the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. He received his Ph.D. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, 1985. His S.M.(1980), S.B.(1978) degrees were received from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Dr. Ammar's research interests are in the areas of computer network and Internet architectures and protocols, multipoint communication, and scalable information systems. He is the co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the 7th WWW Conference (1998). Dr. Ammar is the co-author of the textbook "Fundamentals of Telecommunication Networks," published by John Wiley and Sons. He is a member of the editorial boards of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and Computer Networks and ISDN Systems Journal. He is also the co-guest editor of the April 1997 of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication on "Network Support for Multipoint Communication". He was the Technical Program Co-Chair for the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols.
SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/