Re: *Real* Distributed Computing

Dear Mike,

I am not an expert in distributed programming. However, this is certainly one of the topics of interest of the Mozart community(www.mozart-oz.org). Indeed, some colleagues of mine are working on the topics that you cite below.

Please consider sending a copy of your message to news://news.mozart-oz.org/mozart-oz.users

Cheers,
Luis

[posted to other CS groups as well]

Hi.

Sorry about the multi-posting, but I wanted to get a general opinion of
those online.  The groups I chose (while on the surface may not seem like
they would have a lot in common with distributed computing) all intersect
with the idea of collaboratively solving problems in an environment where
one may not have a complete set of information.  Where there is no 'global'
entity that sees the global state of the system - ie: where each
participating entity's view of the world is relative to the other entities
in direct proximity to it.  (Actually, with comp.theory, the question is
whether this group is a single-process, Turing machine only group, or
whether posts about DC fall into the realm of acceptable messages).
Anyways, on to the original post:

I was wondering if anyone in this group is looking into the theoretical side
of distributed computing.  I keep reading definitions of DC to the effect of
"DC is a method of computing where one a) breaks a large problem into
smaller parts, b) distributes the partial workloads to a set of processes
that compute the partial solutions, c) finally recombines the partial
solutions into a total solution".  ie: SETI, etc...

This is an *example* of distributed computing - a particular, and very
straight-forward use of many computers, but it is by no means a
definition of DC.

Does anyone here look into things such as decision tasks (the renaming
problem, k-set agreement, consensus) or any theoretical papers in the field
(FLP, the asynchronous computability theorem, the relationship between
algebraic topology and distributed computing, dihomotopy, ditopological
homology groups, various calculi for concurrent systems, fine-grained
concurrency, fault-tolerance, provable impossibility of certain tasks,
computability in asynchronous, semi-synchronous and synchronous networks,
worst-case message complexity of distributed tasks, randomized distributed
algorithms, self-stabilization, shared-memory vs. message passing models,
fault-tolerance, Byzantine failures, crash failures, omission failures, etc,
etc, etc...)?

Check out the following link to get a small peek into what I mean:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=algebraic.topology+distributed.computing
&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Search

I'd be interested to know if these things are still entirely a part of
academia or whether there are people out there who discuss these things in
their spare time.


Thanks,



Mike N. Christoff



.

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