Mohammad's Assignment 14

At the beginning of this semester I mentioned in my questionnaire that I’m still uncertain about the area that I will specialize in, I was hoping that by the end of the semester I will have a much better idea of what area I will be in and some ideas for my PhD thesis. Unfortunately, I’m still not very sure; however, I’m currently between Artificial intelligence and system as general areas. For systems, I’m interested in Networks and distributed systems, which is what I will be considering for this assignment.

Distributed systems have been around for several years, companies, organizations and institutes deploy systems in a distributed manner to achieve reliability, scalability and increase capacity. Distributed systems used to be deployed as few servers or maybe Data Centers connected together using dedicated leased lines. This concept significantly changed due in large to the Internet. Nowadays, there is this concept of large scale peer to peer distributed systems which contains tens of thousands and in many cases millions of peers connected to each other over the Internet. Some peer to peer distributed systems are just for file and content sharing like KaZaA and Bit Torrent, others provide distributed computational power like the Folding@home project, which uses the unused computational of computers connected to the Internet. Currently, all those application are very specific, I propose developing an application that can be used to utilize and use available resources of machines connected to the Internet or any internal network inside an organization or institute. Those resources can storage or computational. There will be several issues and challenges to overcome which are related to security, efficiency, and control and management of such distributed systems.

Last modified 11 December 2007 at 8:58 am by mohammad