Database-centric architecture

About: Database-centric architecture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1799 publications have been published within this topic receiving 48836 citations.

Agent space architecture for search engines

Abstract: The future of computing is moving from individual processing units to communities of self organizing agents. In This work we propose an agent and network based architecture for parallel and distributed computing called agent space architecture. Our architecture builds upon the notions of agent and object space and utilizes multicast networks. The building blocks for our proposed architecture consist of an active processing unit called agent, a shared place for communication called space, and a communication medium called multicast network. One unique feature of our architecture is that we extend the concept of object space to become an active space. Our active space functions as a rendezvous, a repository, a cache, a responder, a notifier, and a manager of its own resources. The organization of our architecture is as general as network topology. Any number of agents, spaces, or networks can be added to achieve high performance. It is as scalable as Ethernet and adding agents or spaces is as easy as plug and play. High availability and fault tolerance is achieved through multiple agents, spaces, and networks. All these features are particularly beneficial for challenging applications such as search engine, which is used as a test case to implement and to test our proposed architecture.

Distribution of a Simple Shared Dataspace Architecture

Abstract: We study a simple software architecture, in which components are coordinated by writing into and reading from a global set. This simple architecture is inspired by the industrial software architecture Splice. We present two results. First, a distributed implementation of the architecture is given and proved correct formally. In the implementation, local sets are maintained and data items are exchanged between these local sets. Next we show that the architecture is sufficiently expressive in principle. In particular, every global specification of a system's behaviour can be divided into components, which coordinate by read and write primitives on a global set only. We heavily rely on recent concepts and proof methods from process algebra.

The has architecture: a highly available and scalable cluster architecture for web servers

Abstract: This dissertation proposes a novel architecture, called the HAS architecture, for highly available and scalable web server clusters. The proof-of-concept of the HAS architecture was validated for performance and scalability, tested for its failover mechanisms, and externally modeled and simulated to study the failure and repair behavior and to calculate the availability of the cluster. The HAS architecture is able to maintain the base line performance per cluster processor, for up to 16 traffic processors in the cluster, achieving close to linear scalability. The architecture supports dynamic traffic distribution, supports heterogeneous cluster nodes, provides a mechanism to keep track of available cluster nodes, and offers connection synchronization to ensure that web connections survive software or hardware failures. Furthermore, the architecture supports different redundancy models and high availability capabilities such as Ethernet and NFS redundancy, and node level redundancy that contribute in increasing the availability of the service, and in eliminating single points of failure. This dissertation presents current methods for scaling web servers, discusses their limitations, and investigates how clustering technologies can help overcome some of these challenges and enable the design of scalable web servers based on a cluster of workstations. It examines various ongoing research projects in the academia and the industry that are investigating scalable and highly available architectures for web servers. It discusses their scope, architecture, provides a critical analysis of their work, and presents their contributions to this dissertation. This dissertation contributes the HAS architecture, a highly available and scalable architecture for web servers, and offers contributions in areas of scalability, maintaining baseline performance, and availability.

The socio-economics of software architecture

Abstract: The paper argues that strategic decisions about software architectures need to be based on a social and economic analysis of which designs are likely to succeed and become accepted by users. Software architecture is increasingly having to take account of customisation, reuse, end-user development and system configuration. The relationship between architecture and end users' requirements is investigated, to propose a cost-benefit framework to support reasoning about architectural choices from the perspective of end users. The relationships between architectural decisions and non-functional requirements is reviewed, and the impact on architecture is assessed using a case study of developing configurable, semi-intelligent software to support medical researchers in e-science domains.