skip to main content
column

Modularity: a first class concept to address distributed systems

Published: 01 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Decomposing distributed systems into modules, each with a precise interface and a functional implementation independent specification, is highly effective both from a software engineering point of view and for theoretical purposes. The usefulness of this approach has been demonstrated in the past in several areas of distributed computing. Yet, despite its attractiveness, so far work on peer to peer systems failed to do so. This paper argues in favor of this approach and advocates such a decomposition for peer to peer systems. This allows designers to understand and explain both what a system does and how it does it.

References

[1]
http://www.gnutella.com/]]
[2]
Attiya H., Bar-Noy A. and Dolev D., Sharing Memory Robustly in Message-Passing Systems. Journal of the ACM, 42(1): 124--142, 1995.]]
[3]
Attiya H. and Welch J. L., Sequential consistency versus linearizability. ACM Transactions On Computer Systems, 12(2):91--122, 1994.]]
[4]
Bonnet F., Kermarrec A.-M. and Raynal M., Small-world networks: from theoretical bounds to practical systems. Proc. 11th Int'l Conference On Principles Of Distributed Systems (OPODIS'07), Springer-Verlag LNCS 4878, pp. 372--385, 2007.]]
[5]
Chandra T. D. and Toueg S., Unreliable failure detectors for reliable distributed systems. Journal of the ACM, 43(2):225--267, 1996.]]
[6]
Cristian F. and Fetzer C., The timed asynchronous system model. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 10(6):642--657, 1999.]]
[7]
Dabek F., Zhao B., Druschel P., Kubiatowicz J., and Stoica I., Towards a common API for structured peer to peer overlays. Proc. 2nd Int'l Workshop on peer to peer Systems (IPTPS '03), Berkeley, CA, 2003.]]
[8]
Dwork C., Lynch N. and Stockmeyer L. J., Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony. Journal of the ACM, 35(2): 288--323, 1988.]]
[9]
Eugster P., Handurukande S., Guerraoui R., Kermarrec A.-M., and Kouznetsov P., Lightweight probabilistic broadcast, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 21(4):341--374, 2003.]]
[10]
Fischer M. J., Lynch N. and Paterson M. S., Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. Journal of the ACM, 32(2):374--382, 1985.]]
[11]
Ganesh A. J., Kermarrec A.-M., and Massoulié L., Peer to peer membership management for gossipbased protocols. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 52(2):139--149, 2003.]]
[12]
Gharachorloo K., Lenoski D., Laudon J., Gibbons P., Gupta A. and Hennessy J., Memory consistency and event ordering in scalable shared-memory multiprocessor. Proc. 17th Int'l Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA '90), pp. 15--90, 1990.]]
[13]
Gontmake A. and Schuster A., Non-operational characterizations for Java memory model. ACM Transactions On Computer Systems (TOCS), 18(4):333--386, 2000.]]
[14]
Gosling J., Joy G. and Steele G., The Java Language Specification, Addison-Wesley, 1996.]]
[15]
Jelasity M. and Babaoglu O., T-Man: Gossip-Based Overlay Topology Management Engineering Self-Organising Systems, 1(15), 2005.]]
[16]
Jelasity M., Voulgaris S., Guerraoui R., Kermarrec A.-M, and van Steen M. Gossip-based peer sampling. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 25(3), 2007.]]
[17]
Kleinberg J. The small-world phenomenon: An algorithmic perspective. Proc. 32nd ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC'00), ACM press, pp. 163--170, 2000.]]
[18]
Lamport, L. Composition: A Way to Make Proofs Harder. Revised Lectures from the Int'l Symposium on Compositionality: The Significant Difference (COMPOS), Springer-Verlag, LNCS #1998, pp. 402--423, 1998.]]
[19]
Mostefaoui A., Mourgaya E., and Raynal M., Asynchronous implementation of failure detectors. Proc. Int'l IEEE Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'03), IEEE Computer Press, pp. 351--360, 2003.]]
[20]
Pugh W., Fixing the Java memory model. Proc. ACM Conference on Java Grande (JAVA'99), ACM Press, pp. 89--98, 1999.]]
[21]
Rowstron A. and Druschel P., Pastry: scalable, distributed object location and routing for large scale peer to peer systems, Proc. of IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms (Middleware), 2001.]]
[22]
Ratnasamy S., Francis P., Handley M., Karp R., and Shenker S. A Scalable Content-Addressable Network. Proc. of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM'01), ACM Press, pp. 161--172, 2001.]]
[23]
Stoica I., Morris R., Liben-Nowell D., Karger D., Kaashoek M. F., Dabek F. and Balakrishnan H., Chord: A scalable peer to peer lookup protocol for Internet applications. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 11(1): 17--32, 2003.]]
[24]
Voulgaris S., Gavidia D. and van Steen M., CYCLON: inexpensive membership management for unstructured P2P overlays. Journal of Network and Systems Management, 13(2):197--217, 2005.]]
[25]
Watts D. J. and Stogatz S. H. Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 393, 1998.]]
[26]
Zhao B. Y., Kubiatowicz J. D. and Joseph A. D., Tapestry: an infrastructure for fault-tolerant wide-area location and routing, UCB/CSD-01-1141, Computer Science Department, U.C. Berkeley, 2001.]]

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Context Aware Adaptive ML Inference in Mobile-Cloud Applications2022 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM)10.1109/WoWMoM54355.2022.00031(90-99)Online publication date: Jun-2022

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGACT News
ACM SIGACT News  Volume 39, Issue 2
June 2008
117 pages
ISSN:0163-5700
DOI:10.1145/1388240
Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 June 2008
Published in SIGACT Volume 39, Issue 2

Check for updates

Qualifiers

  • Column

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)1
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Context Aware Adaptive ML Inference in Mobile-Cloud Applications2022 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM)10.1109/WoWMoM54355.2022.00031(90-99)Online publication date: Jun-2022

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media