The goal of the project to develop techniques for upgrading software in object-oriented databases and in robust distributed systems. This is a joint with PMG group at MIT.
The web is an example of a highly scalable distributed system evolving
into a world-wide storage system that is very hard
to write programs to reliably access its information.
The goal of the Microbs project is not to fix the web but
develop a scalable and reliable object storage system architecture
that uses transactional techniques
to allow programs to realiably access long-lived
objects stored in a world-wide storage system.
This is a joint project with Barbara Liskov and
Thor project at MIT.
The Astor project is part of the larger Active Networks project
and a collaboration with
ActiveNet
group at MIT.
ActiveNet addresses the mismatch between the rate at which
user requirements can change, i.e. overnight, and the pace at which
physical assets can be deployed. As the Internet grows it is
increasingly difficult to maintain, let alone accelerate, the pace of
innovation. The ActiveNet accelerates the pace of
innovation by decoupling network services from the underlying hardware
and by allowing new services to be demand loaded into the
infrastructure.
The goal of Astor project at Brandeis is to develop a active storage
technologies that enable the use of storage
objects within the network infrastructure. Active storage
provides programming abstractions for scalable storage and
consistent update of ActiveNet objects that encapsulate state that is cached
at nodes, but can be re-acquired or generated on demand, and state
that is persistent and must be preserved within the Active Net.
We are designing active storage system that provides cooperative caching for "soft" objects in active network nodes to support information associated with network layer "flows". We are designing a more persistent form of active storage that supports storage of information associated with transport layer connections. To allow efficient access to persistent and highly-available objects within the network we leverage the scalable technology develloped in the Thor distributed object storage system at MIT.