NSF Org:	EIA DIVISION OF EXPERIMENTAL & INTEG ACTIVIT
Recipient:	TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date:	July 14, 1997
Latest Amendment Date:	August 10, 1999
Award Number:	9706685
Award Instrument:	Continuing Grant
Program Manager:	Mita D. Desai EIA  DIVISION OF EXPERIMENTAL & INTEG ACTIVIT CSE  Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date:	July 15, 1997
End Date:	June 30, 2001 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount:	$590,087.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date:	$590,087.00
Funds Obligated to Date:	FY 1997 = $157,779.00 FY 1998 = $200,290.00 FY 1999 = $232,018.00
History of Investigator:	Azer Bestavros (Principal Investigator) best@bu.edu Mark Crovella (Co-Principal Investigator) David Yates (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office:	Trustees of Boston University 1 SILBER WAY BOSTON MA  US  02215-1703 (617)353-4365
Sponsor Congressional District:	07
Primary Place of Performance:	Trustees of Boston University 1 SILBER WAY BOSTON MA  US  02215-1703
Primary Place of Performance Congressional District:	07
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI):	THL6A6JLE1S7
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s):	DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, EXPERIMENTAL SYSTEMS/CADRE
Primary Program Source:	app-0100  app-0197  app-0198  app-0199
Program Reference Code(s):	9216, HPCC
Program Element Code(s):	287600, 472500
Award Agency Code:	4900
Fund Agency Code:	4900
Assistance Listing Number(s):	47.070

ABSTRACT

The phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web is imposing considerable strain on Internet resources and Web servers, prompting numerous concerns about the Web's continued viability. The success of high-performance Web servers in alleviating these performance problems is ultimately limited, unless Web services are designed to be inherently scalable. The Commonwealth project aims to design, implement, and evaluate a prototypical architecture and a set of associated protocols for scalable Web services. The Commonwealth architecture for hosting scalable Web services allows scalability through (1) parallel processing on tightly-coupled nodes within a Web site, and (2) load distribution across loosely-coupled Web sites. Commonwealth's underlying philosophy is to achieve a WEALTH of performance through the use of COMMON components, and to do so along an incremental upgrade path. The Commonwealth protoype will catalyze basic research in four main areas: (1) Data placement (caching, prefetching, and dissemination protocols); (2) Resource management (scheduling, load balancing, and admission control protocols); (3) Networking (routing, packet redirection, and connection migration) and (4) Middleware services (replication and resource discovery). These problems will be addressed with particular attention to the issue of high-variability, which---in previous work by the principal investigators---was shown to pose significant problems for the design of Internet-based systems.

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