Khazana: An Infrastructure for Building Distributed Services

Overview: Essentially all distributed systems, applications, and services at some point boil down to the problem of managing distributed shared state (e.g., clustered file servers, directory servers, distributed databases, distributed object systems, collaborative groupware, and even the Web). Unfortunately, while the problem of managing distributed shared state is shared by many applications, there is no common means of managing the data - every application devices its own solution. We are developing Khazana, a distributed service exporting the abstraction of a distributed secure persistent globally shared store that applications can use to store their shared state. Khazana is responsible for performing many of the common operations needed by distributed applications, including replication, consistency management, fault recovery, access control, and location management. Using Khazana as a form of middleware, distributed applications can be quickly developed from corresponding uniprocessor applications through the insertion of Khazana data access and synchronization operations.

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Publications

  1. J. Carter, A. Ranganathan, and S. Susarla, "Khazana: An Infrastructure for Building Distributed Services." In the Proceedings of the 18th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pp. 562--571, May 1998.

  2. S. Susarla, A. Ranganathan, and J. Carter, "Experience Using a Globally Shared State Abstraction to Support Distributed Applications." University of Utah, Department of Computer Science, Technical Report UU-CS-98-016, August 1998.

  3. A. Ranganathan, Y. Izrailevsky, S. Susarla, J. Carter, and G. Lindstrom. Supporting Persistent C++ Objects in a Distributed Shared Environment." In Proceedings of the WCSSS '99: ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Compiler Support for System Software. Atlanta, GA. May 1st, 1999. pp. 64-71.

  4. S.Susarla, A.Ranganathan, Y.Izrailevsky, S.Susarla. Using Khazana to Support Distributed Application Development. University of Utah, Department of Computer Science, Technical Report#: UU-CS-TR-99-008. July 1999.

Last updated: Jan 10, 2000