PATIA : Adaptive Management System for Distributed Webservices

 

 
  • Internal stuff for Patia research group
The viability of future Internet applications will depend on their scalability. The Patia project aims to carry out studies into data placement and request scheduling to prototype an adaptive webserver management system.

hypatia.jpg (3539 bytes)

Today, web sites have moved beyond static HTML pages on single webservers and are required to host many media and types of documents whilst generating dynamic content or processing transactions. That is, websites now include multiple resources -- webserver, files, applications, databases, and other software processes on multiple servers in many locations. For example a single ‘web site’ may consist of a selection of traditional  hypertext documents, which may be relatively immutable but are required to be indexed for searching purposes. It also may host dynamic pages, which are generated typically from a combination of relational database systems and other sources. At the same time, it may host chat-room areas or community arenas as well as perhaps ('live') video and other multi-media. Further, with the introduction of technology for mobile phones and PDAs these sites must also maintain a lightweight version of their pages and must also store the mechanisms to generate this. There are many current examples. As well as web-TV fitting this description it has been found that 79 percent of audio webcast listeners buy products online while listening to their favourite web-station [13]. Such a statistic encourages what we call a multi-faceted web site. We believe the success of such 'portals' in terms of performance lies in the architecture of the underlying servers and their ability to adapt to changes in demand and resource availability, as well as their ability to scale.

The name Patia is a shortened form of Hypatia, the only recorded woman scholar in the ancient world.

Personnel

Principal Investigator Dr J. A. McCann Imperial College
Research Assistant Gawesh Jawaheer Imperial College
Research Assistant Linxue Sun Imperial College
Industrial Partners The Digital Village (BBC) & Sun Microsystems

Last modified: 22 Jan 2002 12:47

(c) J.A.McCann, Imperial College. This information can only be used for review and criticism, no other use is permitted without prior permission by the author.