Intelligent gossip

The gossip paradigm made its first appearance in distributed systems in 1987, when it was applied to disseminate updates in replicated databases. Two decades later, gossip-based protocols have gone far beyond dissemination, solving a large and diverse collection of problems. We believe that the story is not over: while gossip is not the panacea for distributed systems, there are still virgin research areas where it could be profitably exploited. In this paper, we briefly discuss a gossip-based "construction set" for distributed systems and we illustrate how intelligent distributed computing could benefit by the application of its building blocks. Simple examples are provided to back up our claim. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.