Coordinating Access to Computation and Data in Distributed Systems
Douglas Thain · 2004
Distributed computing has become a complex ecosystem of protocols and services for managing computation and data. Distributed applications are becoming complex as well. Users, particularly in scientific fields, wish to deploy large numbers of applications with complex dependencies and a large appetite for both computation and data. How may such systems and applications be brought together? I propose that applications deployed in distributed systems should be represented by an agent. The role of the agent is to transform an application's abstract operations into concrete operations on the varying resources in a distributed system. The agent must hide the unpleasant aspects of individual resources while coordinating their activity in a manner specialized to each application. I examine four open problems in the design of agents for distributed computing.