The URL for the Microsoft Graduate Fellowship Program:
http://research.microsoft.com/msrinfo/opps/fellows.htm
The URL for my PhD Thesis Proposal, included below
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/phd/phd-proposal.html
What happens now is that Microsoft Research will review all nominees
from schools participating in the Microsoft Graduate Fellowship Program
and select finalists by February 27, 1998. If I pass that hurdle, I am
flown up to Redmond for an interview by March 27, 1998. Hey Rohit,
where do you keep that list of Microsoft interview questions? :)
> USING A GLOBAL EVENT MODEL IN DISTRIBUTED RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ALGORITHMS
>
> PhD Thesis Research Proposal Summary
> Submitted for Microsoft Graduate Fellowship
> Also Available in Postscript
>
> Adam Rifkin, adam@cs.caltech.edu
> California Institute of Technology
> Computer Science 256-80, Pasadena, CA 91125
>
> January 30, 1998
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> MOTIVATION
>
> Local events are a useful programming abstraction for triggering
> procedure calls in applications; for example, events have been widely
> applied to control flow in graphical interface toolkits. By clearly
> separating the event producers and the listeners that deal with
> generated events, event-oriented programming has several key
> properties: encapsulation of event generation, notification, and
> handling; scalability of producer and listener membership; and
> automatic propagation of events when something interesting happens.
>
> We believe that global events, distributed among multiple virtual
> machines, can aid in the development of and reasoning about
> distributed systems of autonomous components interacting through
> event-based abstractions. Developing a global event model for
> wide-area Internet applications presents a research opportunity to
> adapt event-oriented programming to the Internet's unique scalability
> and availability requirements.
>
> Distributed resource management is an archetypal challenge of
> wide-area coordination that illuminates many of the tradeoffs
> involved. We model the problem with resource tokens, providers,
> consuming requestors, and constraints. Colored tokens network
> represent resources of specific types, providers of resources can join
> into worldwide provider pools, and clients can request resources from
> specific pools (based on scope and custom preferences) with
> constraints such as:
>
> ``Please arrange for a plane (from Burbank), hotel, and car for my
> trip to Seattle for March 23--28, 1998, and although I prefer to fly
> United, it is more important to keep the total cost under $1200.''
>
> What makes such resource management problems interesting is that the
> providers, requestors, token colors, and constraints can all be
> dynamic, decentralized, and distributed.
>
> Since distributed programming skills are scarce, such problems are
> usually solved as mission-critical custom applications. We believe
> global events provide a flexible framework for creating on-the-fly
> networks. Groups of providers should be able to join together to form
> instant organizations that can provide collections of resources that
> perhaps no single provider could. Furthermore, ``online just-in-time
> middlemen'' which themselves are neither explicitly resource providers
> nor requestors, can be useful intermediaries for discovering
> requestors and providers, coordinating requests and their servicing by
> potentially competing providers, and collating information relevant to
> end-parties. The key characteristic of algorithms using these grouping
> and middlemen abstractions is the composability of the participants in
> a manner that is dynamic, decentralized, and distributed.
>
> In this thesis, we will examine event-oriented algorithms for
> distributed resource management, and compare our solutions to existing
> approaches. Since we can demonstrate the isomorphism between events,
> messages, and remote procedure calls, we expect our results to be
> widely applicable.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> RESEARCH AGENDA
>
> Local event models lack several mechanisms useful to developers when
> components can be globally distributed and dynamically reconfigurable:
> facilities for handling component and communication channel faults and
> for dealing with exceptional behavior such as excessive communication
> latencies; filtering facilities based on predicates that can include
> soft real-time constraints (because decentralized clockscannot
> guarantee global accuracy); and composition facilities for using
> technologies such as multicast and techniques such as event notifier
> aggregation. We intend to analyze and to understand the event-oriented
> paradigm in general, and its composing, filtering, and scaling
> properties in particular.
>
> There is a tension between scalability and availability of the
> components participating in event-oriented algorithms. In some cases,
> resource consumers poll providers with announcements in some order
> until the request is satisfied. In other cases, resource consumers
> merely announce a call for service, and collaborating providers take
> responsibility for listening and assembling a basket of resources; or,
> middlemen take responsibility for listening and assembling a basket of
> resources, by collating resource offers from competing providers. In
> all cases, widening the announcement scope increases the pool of
> available providers, at the expense of increased wide-area message
> traffic.
>
> Our overall algorithm design goal is to strike a balance between
> scalability and availability of the providers, requestors, and
> resources; to that end, we will employ techniques such as aggregating,
> hierarchical structuring, and scoping. We will compare and contrast
> our solutions with traditional methods for data consistency (for
> example, two-phase commit from the database and the distributed shared
> memory communities) and for hot-spot reduction (for example, soft
> state from the multicast community and caching from the Web client and
> randomized algorithm communities).
>
> Several applications can benefit from our analysis, including
> transaction services, automatic intermediation, and metacomputing. We
> will design algorithms that exploit event-oriented development, and
> reason about them using probabilistic models and temporal logic. Then
> we will implement and evaluate selected algorithms, comparing them
> with traditional approaches based on performance metrics such as:
> average response time to receive resources, resilience to faults,
> bandwidth utilization, and real-time guarantees.
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
"This is my first step toward a thesis," Adam said abstractly.