Section: Research Program

Overview

In order to progress in the four fields described above, the WIDE team is developing a research program which aims to help developers control and master the inherent uncertainties and performance challenges brought by scale and distribution.

More specifically, our program revolves around four key challenges.

• Challenge 1: Designing Hybrid Scalable Architectures,

• Challenge 2: Constructing Personalizable Privacy-Aware Distributed Systems,

• Challenge 3: Understanding Controllable Network Diffusion Processes,

• Challenge 4: Systemizing Modular Distributed Computability and Efficiency.

These four challenges have in common the inherent tension between coordination and scalability in large-scale distributed systems: strong coordination mechanisms can deliver strong guarantees (in terms of consistency, agreement, fault-tolerance, and privacy protection), but are generally extremely costly and inherently non-scalable if applied indiscriminately. By contrast, highly scalable coordination approaches (such as epidemic protocols, eventual consistency, or self-organizing overlays) perform much better when the size of a system increases, but do not, in most cases, provide any strong guarantees in terms of consistency or agreement.

The above four challenges explore these tensions from four complementary angles: from an architectural perspective (Challenge 1), from the point of view of a fundamental system-wide guarantee (privacy protection, Challenge 2), looking at one universal scalable mechanism (network diffusion, Challenge 3), and considering the interplay between modularity and computability in large-scale systems (Challenge 4). These four challenges range from practical concerns (Challenges 1 and 2) to more theoretical questions (Challenrges 3 and 4), yet present strong synergies and fertile interaction points. E.g. better understanding network diffusion (Challenge 3) is a key enabler to develop more private decentralized systems (Challenge 2), while the development of a theoretically sound modular computability hierarchy (Challenge 4) has a direct impact on our work on hybrid architectures (Challenge 1).