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TWIST Series

Sponsored by:

UC Institute for
Software Research (ISR)

http://www.isr.uci.edu/

» The attendance list is now available.

The goal of TWIST 2000 is to substantively explore design tensions between centralizing and decentralizing forces on the Internet, the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized architectures, and the long term implications which lead architects to design one way or the other.

Many of the most successful applications on the Internet today are architecturally centralized. Among these are eBay, AOL, and Amazon.com. The success of these centralized architectures is surprising to some, given the fundamentally decentralized way the Internet itself and the World Wide Web work.

Alternatively, many companies and research projects have advocated decentralized applications. Such applications are touted as having the advantages of robustness, scalability based upon replication (rather than just raw speed), resource sharing, and ability to span trust domains. Applications of the decentralized approach include SETI@Home (parallel scientific computing) and the Air Traffic Control system (distributed command and control).

Many applications employ a mixed strategy, including financial trading and email. Consider how Travelocity, for example, is implemented as a decentralized Web application wrapping the centralized Sabre reservations service. Other applications exhibit both strategies depending on the layer of abstraction considered: the Domain Name Service is a centralized monopoly of names in a decentralized database, or how Akamai appears as a single global Web cache to a browser but internally relies on globally distributed servers, or eBay, a centralized service enabling wildly decentralized marketplaces.

We seek answers to such questions as:

• Can centralized applications continue to scale with the growth of Internet users, traffic, types of services, and customer base?
• Can existing centralized approaches continue to grow unabated, or will they reach hard limits?
• If they can grow unabated, then how can this be accomplished and how does it impact decentralized application architecture and development?

Issues to consider include:

• At what levels of an application's design should distribution be employed?
• What are the key distinguishing characteristics of services (applications) for which centralized architectures (exploiting Moore's Law) will continue to suffice?
• Under what circumstances are decentralized architectures superior? Necessary?
• What sort of application spaces do applications such as Internet phones/smartphones have?

Axes of influence include:

• Economic and business models.
• Trust.
• Robustness/fault-tolerance.
• Scale.
• Problem characteristics.
• Democratization. Participants often vote their resources by deciding to share information or compute cycles.

Presenters

• Nasser Barghouti, ONEWORLD Software Solutions, naser@oneworldsoftware.com
• Adam L. Beberg, Mithral Communications & Design, Inc., The Cosm Project, beberg@mithral.com
• Gregory Alan Bolcer, Founder and CTO, Endeavors Technology, Inc., gbolcer@endtech.com
• George H. Brett II, Senior Project Coordinator, NLANR/DAST NCSA ACCESS, ghb@nlanr.net
• Mark Stuart Day, Senior Scientist, Cisco Systems, markday@cisco.com
• Premkumar Devanbu, University of California, Davis, devanbu@cs.ucdavis.edu
• Lucas Gonze, WorldOS, Lucas Gonze Engineering, Inc., lucas@gonze.com
• Adriana Iamnitchi, University of Chicago, anda@cs.uchicago.edu
• John King, Dean, School of Information, University of Michigan, jlking@umich.edu
• Alvina Nishimoto, R&D Program Manager, Hewlett-Packard, alvina_nishimoto@hp.com
• Edith H. Stern, Manager, Business Integration Technologies, IBM Research, estern@us.ibm.com
• Dawit Yimam, GMD - German National Research Center for IT, dawit.yimam@gmd.de
• Eric Yu, University of Toronto, eric@cs.toronto.edu

Attendance

Attendance at the workshop was by invitation only, based on submission of an informal statement of interests.

A list of TWIST 2000 attendees is available.

Workshop Report

The workshop organizers will produce a report subsequent to the workshop which wil be submitted for widespread publication. A proceedings will not be produced.

TWIST Workshop Series

TWIST 2000 is the third workshop in the annual TWIST series. TWIST 99 focused on Internet-scale Namespaces. WISEN 98 focused on Internet-scale Event Notification.

TWIST 2000 URL:

http://www.isr.uci.edu/twist2000/