Section: Software

BitDew

Participants : Gilles Fedak [correspondant] , Haiwu He, Bing Tang, José Francisco Saray Villamizar, Mircea Moca, Lu Lu.

BitDew is an open source middleware implementing a set of distributed services for large scale data management on Desktop Grids and Clouds. BitDew relies on five abstractions to manage the data : i) replication indicates how many occurrences of a data should be available at the same time on the network, ii) fault-tolerance controls the policy in presence of hardware failures, iii) lifetime is an attribute absolute or relative to the existence of other data, which decides of the life cycle of a data in the system, iv) affinity drives movement of data according to dependency rules, v) protocol gives the runtime environment hints about the protocol to distribute the data (http, ftp, or bittorrent). Programmers define for every data these simple criteria, and let the BitDew runtime environment manage operations of data creation, deletion, movement, replication, and fault-tolerance operation.

BitDew is distributed open source under the GPLv3 or Cecill licence at the user's choice. 10 releases were produced over the last two years, and it has been downloaded approximately 6,000 times on the Inria forge. Known users are Université Paris-XI, Université Paris-XIII, University of Florida (USA), Cardiff University (UK) and University of Sfax (Tunisia). In terms of support, the development of BitDew is partly funded by the Inria ADT BitDew and by the ANR MapReduce projects. Thanks to this support, we have developed and released the first prototype of the MapReduce programming model for Desktop Grids on top of BitDew. In 2012, 8 versions of the software have been released, including the version 1.2.0 considered as a stable release of BitDew with many advanced features. Our most current work focuses on providing reliable storage on top of hybrid distributed computing infrastructures.