Building distributed applications using multiple, heterogeneous environments

Abstract

There continues to be genuine interest in expanding application environments to include geographically-distributed resources and to be able to dynamically re-configure the environment to suit the needs of the application. The expansion of an application’s resource pool and dynamicity of the environment introduces fresh nuances in programming paradigms and demands novel characteristics of the substrate exportable to the application. This paper describes our research efforts toward the goal of providing applications with such an environment; one that is able to actively adopt and relinquish resource pools, is able to pre-configure and dynamically re-configure attributes to suit the needs of the application, and maintains reliability and persistence in the presence of failures. This paper discusses our findings relating to portability and utility aspects of shared-library usage over heterogeneous environments.