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Client Prefetching for the
Web
Is it possible to prefetch WWW documents? Is it possible for clients
to perform prefetching based on previous user access patterns? How
effective would such techniques be in terms of reducing server load
and service time? These and other questions are the subject of this
research project, which attempts to characterize the spatial
locality of reference for Web documents and to exploit this locality
to perform client-initiated prefetching.
Investigators: Azer Bestavros, Carlos Cunha, and Martin Mroz.
The Commonwealth
Server
The goal of the Commonwealth Server Project is to make
high-performance servers common, by demonstrating that they can be
constructed in a scalable manner from relatively low-cost components.
The strength of the Commonwealth Server is the combination of
appealing performance/cost ratios with easily scaled performance. The
design goal of the Commonwealth Server Project is software allowing
inexpensive PC-class machines to act as a server that can be scaled
up, in a cost-effective manner, to 100 million hits/day.
Investigators: Mark Crovella, Azer Bestavros, David Yates, and Virgilio Almeida.
Dynamic Network
Measurement and Prediction
This goal of this project is the development of techniques and tools
for dynamically measuring and predicting resource availability in
wide-area networks. Originally motivated by the
Server Selection Problem, the uses
for our techniques have expanded into the general notion of
application-level congestion avoidance. Our tools are designed to
give applications information about the current latency, link speed, and
congestion to arbitrary hosts, and to provide estimates of such values in the
future. Using such information, applications can find "nearby" servers,
can avoid congested paths, and can minimize latency of transfers.
Investigators: Bob Carter and Mark Crovella
Wave
In this project we develop Wave, a fully distributed protocol
and an associated set of policies to maximize total server
throughput by balancing the load among document and cache servers
across an internet. Wave is being designed so as to respond very
quickly to global changes in load, without introducing instabilities.
We believe that distributed document dissemination services should
integrate---to a limited extent---caching with routing, broadcasting
and name resolution. In particular, Wave places cache copies along
virtual routes that client requests follow to document home sites, so
as to intercept and fulfill these requests on-the-fly. If virtual
routes are constrained to be close approximations of physical routes,
then the communication overhead of our scheme can be kept small.
We have extended MaRS (Maryland Routing Simulator) to model caching
behavior and to monitor and gossip load information.
Investigators: Abdelsalam Heddaya, and Sulaiman Mirdad.
WebHint
Is it
possible for servers to predict what their clients would request in
the future and service (or provide hints) about such requests
speculatively? How effective
would such techniques be in terms of reducing server load and service
time? These and other questions are the subject of this research
project, which tries to capitalize on the temporal and
spatial locality of reference for Web documents to perform
server-initiated speculative service.
Investigators: Azer Bestavros, and Chau Anh Nguyen.
WebSearch
The primary goal of this project is to develop a world wide web image
search tool, for searching web documents based on image
content. Unlike keyword-based search, search by image content allows
users to guide a search through the selection (or creation) of example
images. The technical challenges associated with this project are in
part due to the staggering scale of the world wide web, and in part
due to the problem of developing effective image representations for
very fast search based on image content. In addition, this project
will address issues relating to developing user interfaces for a web
search by image content browser.
Principal Investigator: Stan Sclaroff.
WebSeed
The primary goal of this project is to develop protocols for the
dissemination of information on a supply/demand basis from servers to
their clients. This project relies on a particular future model of the
Internet where in addition to clients and servers, service
proxies offer their storage and bandwidth capacities ``for
rent''. By analyzing the access patterns of its clients, a server
could capitalize on the geographical locality of reference
for its popular Web documents to decide on replication and
placement strategies.
Investigators: Azer Bestavros and Carlos Cunha.
Maintainer: A.Bestavros Created on: 1994.05.02 Updated on: 1996.08.30