The Swift Project

System Support for Distributed Dynamic Content Web Services

Many current web services are based on dynamic content generated on-the-fly. Users connect to a web site and receive customized information, for example, depending on the request parameters as well as the users' preferences and access patterns. Typically, a dynamic content web site is located at a single geographic site and the information is stored in a database. There is a need to scale these systems and increase their availability using replication across a geographically-distributed wide area network.

In such a replicated system, requests execute on "nearby" replicas, thereby avoiding long roundtrip delays, and distributing the load over the replicas. The overall goal of this project is to design and implement a scalable and highly-available data management middleware to be used as the underlying infrastructure of modern dynamic content web services.

Reaching such a goal involves two main efforts: The first is defining consistency criteria that are adapted to large-scale distributed systems, and still meet consistency requirements of web applications. The second is developing an infrastructure to efficiently implement the consistency criteria.

The project is a joint effort between the University of Lugano (USI) and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Traditional large-scale web service architecture

swift

Swift: a higly-available and scalable large-scale web service architecture

Publications:

N. Schiper, F. Pedone. On the Inherent Cost of Atomic Broadcast and Multicast Algorithms in Wide Area Networks.
In 9th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN'08) [ICDCN'08]

N. Schiper, F. Pedone. Optimal Atomic Broadcast and Multicast Algorithms for Wide Area Networks.
In 26th International Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'07), Brief Announcement. [PODC'07-BA] [Technical Report]

N. Schiper, R. Schmidt and F. Pedone. Optimistic Algorithms for Partial Database Replication.
In 20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC'2006), Brief Announcement [DISC'06-BA] [Technical Report]
In 10th International Conference on Principles Of Distributed Systems (OPODIS'2006). [OPODIS'06]

S. Elnikety, F. Pedone and W. Zwaenepoel. Database Replication Using Generalized Snapshot Isolation.
In 24th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS'2005).

S. Elnikety, S. Dropsho, F. Pedone. Tashkent: Moving Durability from the Database to the Middleware for Scalable Database Replication.
In EuroSys 2006.

Project members:	Fernando Pedone (Associate Professsor, USI)
	Willy Zwaenepoel (Full Professor, EPFL)
	Nicolas Schiper (PhD Student, USI)
	Sameh Elnikety (PhD Student, EPFL)

For further details:	Fernando Pedone
	Faculty of Informatics
	Università della Svizzera Italiana
	CH-6904 Lugano, Switzerland
	E-mail: firstname.lastname AT unisi.ch

Swift (Scalable WIde area network Fault-Tolerance) is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

last update: Jan 16, 2006