| Speaker: |
David E. Bakken School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Washington State University |
|---|---|
| Topic: | Voting and Collation in Distributed Systems Middleware |
| Date: | Thursday, October 12, 2000 |
| Time: | 11:00 AM |
| Place: | Gould-Simpson, Room 701 |
Replication is a commonly used technique to increase the availability of computer-based services and, in some cases, to lower the delay in accessing them. Active replication is one major form of replication. In this scheme, a client multicasts its request to a replicated group of servers and each services the request and sends a reply. These replicated replies must be voted on to tolerate failures of the server replicas.
To date, voting has been hard-coded and done mainly at the application layer. In this seminar we present the Voting Virtual Machine (VVM), a novel Voting Description Language (VDL). The VVM provides voting primitives and can be inserted into different middleware frameworks such as CORBA and DCOM. VDL allows the description of portable voting algorithms. We will also describe the Voting Status Service (VSS), an intrusion detection source exported by the VVM. Finally, we present ongoing research generalizing voting beyond active replication to involve more general collation in areas such as distributed sensor networks, as well as in voting management.