Task 1.1: The SwarmOS
[
Jones, Kubiatowitz, Lee, Rabaey, Wawrzynek
]
The SwarmOS is the collection of essential services that make swarm
applications possible, trustable, robust, and efficient. This task
will develop the core components of the SwarmOS that will serve as a
distributed executive and resource manager for TerraSwarm
applications. The SwarmOS will mediate the needs of applications for
services and clusters of resources where resource clusters may be, for
example, a portion of a processor's resources, or a slice of
bandwidth. The SwarmOS must be distributed, resource aware, governed
by service-level contracts, capable of restricting admission and of
guaranteeing access to critical services. It must function in a
heterogeneous network, where multiple technologies are combined and
where connectivity may be disrupted or only available
sporadically. The SwarmOS will provide a cross-platform implementation
of a QoS-aware communication and archiving service called the global
data plane (GDP), location-aware routing and caching services, service
discovery, and resource brokerage.
A key goal is to create the "BSD for the Swarm," an open-source,
well documented, thoroughly tested, and bulletproof suite of core
SwarmOS utilities. The task includes leveraging efforts to provide an
open and free certificate authority for the web, applying similar
mechanisms instead to scalable key management in swarm devices. A
second direction concerns how to provide sufficient structure and
metadata for streams on the GDP to enable effective use of learning
techniques. This leverages the extensive experience of the TerraSwarm
machine learning team with the structure of large data sets and the
formal contracts work of theme 2. We envision self-describing data
sets that codify their structure in the language of contracts, and
machine learning algorithms that adapt and are able to aggregate even
data coming from disparate sources with diverse formats and content. A
third direction concerns resource management, specifically resolving
contention for shared resources such as network bandwidth. Again, the
language of contracts provides a potential formal framework for this
work.