Section: Overall Objectives

General objectives

The ASAP project-team focuses its research on a number of aspects in the design of large-scale distributed systems. Our work, ranging from theory to implementation, aims to satisfy the requirements of large-scale distributed platforms, namely scalability, and dealing with uncertainty and malicious behaviors. The recent evolutions that the Internet has undergone yield new challenges in the context of distributed systems, namely the explosion of social networking, the prevalence of notification over search, the privacy requirements and the exponential growth of user-generated data introducing more dynamics than ever.

Scalability

The past decade has been dominated by a major shift in scalability requirements of distributed systems and applications mainly due to the exponential growth of network technologies (Internet, wireless technology, sensor devices, etc.). Where distributed systems used to be composed of up to a hundred of machines, they now involve thousands to millions of computing entities scattered all over the world and dealing with a huge amount of data. In addition, participating entities are highly dynamic, volatile or mobile. Conventional distributed algorithms designed in the context of local area networks do not scale to such extreme configurations. The ASAP project aims to tackle these scalability issues with novel distributed protocols for large-scale dynamic environments.

Personalization

The need for scalability is also reflected in the huge amounts of data generated by Web 2.0 applications. Their fundamental promise, achieving personalization, is limited by the enormous computing capacity they require to deliver effective services like storage, search, or recommendation. Only a few companies can afford the cost of the immense cloud platforms required to process users' personal data and even they are forced to use off-line and cluster-based algorithms that operate on quasi-static data. This is not acceptable when building, for example, a large-scale news recommendation platform that must match a multitude of user interests with a continuous stream of news. Scalable algorithms for personalization systems are one of our main research objectives.

Uncertainty

Effective design of distributed systems requires protocols that are able to deal with uncertainty. Uncertainty used to be created by the effect of asynchrony and failures in traditional distributed systems, it is now the result of many other factors. These include process mobility, low computing capacity, network dynamics, scale, and more recently the strong dependence on personalization which characterizes user-centric Web 2.0 applications. This creates new challenges such as the need to manage large quantities of personal data in a scalable manner while guaranteeing the privacy of users.

Malicious behaviors and privacy

One particularly important form of uncertainty is associated with faults and malicious (or arbitrary) behaviors often modeled as a generic adversary. Protecting a distributed system partially under the control of an adversary is a multifaceted problem. On the one hand, protocols must tolerate the presence of participants that may inject spurious information, send multiple information to processes, because of a bug, an external attack, or even an unscrupulous person with administrative access (Byzantine behaviors). On the other hand, they must also be able to preserve privacy by hiding confidential data from unauthorized participants or from external observers. Within a twenty-year time frame, we can envision that social networks, email boxes, home hard disks, and their online backups will have recorded the personal histories of hundreds of millions of individuals. This raises privacy issues raised by potentially sharing sensitive information with arbitrarily large communities of users.

Successfully managing this scenario requires novel techniques integrating distributed systems, privacy, and data mining with radically different research subjects such as social sciences. In the coming years, we aim to develop these techniques both by building on the expertise acquired during the Gossple project. Gossip algorithms will remain one of the core technologies we use. In these protocols, every node contacts only a few random nodes in each round and exchanges a small amount of information with them. This form of communication is attractive because it offers reasonable performance and is, at the same time, simple, scalable, fault-tolerant, and decentralized. Often, gossip algorithms are designed so that nodes need only little computational power and a small amount of storage space. This makes them perfect candidates to address our objectives: namely dealing with personalization, privacy, and user-generated content, on a variety of devices, including resource-constrained terminals such as mobile phones.