MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Building Scalable, Composable, Adaptive Internet Services with TACC

Armando Fox
University of California, Berkeley

Wednesday, May 6, 1998
4:00 PM (refreshments 3:45)
Room NE43-518
EECS Special Seminar

Abstract

As the Internet continues to grow, the degree of diversity among Internet clients is rapidly increasing. Clients ranging from smart phones to desktop workstations vary by an order of magnitude in bandwidth, hardware capabilities, and display size. Despite this variation, most servers do not adapt their content or its representation for diverse clients. To transparently make existing content and services available in a meaningful manner across a wide variety of clients, I argue for the deployment of infrastructural application-level Internet services.

In particular, I propose TACC, a building-block-based framework and programming model for structuring Internet applications. TACC workers perform Transformation, Aggregation, Caching, and Customization of Internet content, a decomposition of functionality which we believe captures a rich set of Internet applications. Complete TACC applications are constructed by composing workers using a simple set of API's and dispatch rules. Because these API's isolate the programmer from the details of application deployment, TACC applications can be rapidly prototyped and incrementally debugged on a scalable, highly-available server that supports large user communities. This ability makes it practical to obtain and apply immediate feedback from real users on early versions of applications. I will discuss how this was achieved in the context of two TACC applications serving over 10,000 users today: the TranSend web accelerator proxy and the Top Gun Wingman graphical web browser for the PalmPilot. I will also describe how TACC exploits the strengths of cluster computing and how our server design addresses its challenges.