Designing Extreme Distributed Systems: Challenges and Opportunities (Extended Abstract)

Modern distributed systems may consist of hundreds of thousands of computers, ranging from high-end powerful machines to low-end resource-constrained wireless devices. We label them as extreme distributed systems, as they push scalability and complexity well beyond traditional scenarios. Most of these systems are still organized along traditional lines with hierarchical, centralized control planes. Things are changing though: more and more decentralized organizations are emerging, exemplified by P2P systems, ad-hoc networks, vehicular networks, etc. Decentralized organizations often combine local decisionmaking with dissemination of information in order to improve the decision-making process, exemplified by many gossip-based protocols [3]. These protocols have been designed to solve problems as diverse as information dissemination [4], aggregation [6], topology maintenance [7], heartbeat synchronization [1], etc. Solutions to these problems share many common aspects, yet they have been...