Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Distributed Systems and Algorithms

1999; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/3-540-48311-x_108

1611-3349

Gérard Padiou, André Schiper,

Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence

We received 24 papers representing a wide spectrum of research areas in distributed computing: simulation, distributed shared memories, protocols (including mobile computing), middlewares based on CORBA or Java and, of course, distributed algorithms. The variety of submissions shows the importance and the diversity of the research activities in the field of distributed computing. Two comments about the importance of this research: Of the 24 submissions, the Program Committee accepted 6 regular papers and 2 short papers, which have been grouped in two sessions: one devoted to Distributed algorithms, and the other to Distributed systems and middleware. Four regular papers are presented in the Distributed algorithms session. The paper by A. Kshemkalyani and M. Singhal presents new abstractions to reason about distributed computations. Identifying good abstractions has always been an important contribution of the research in distributed systems. Two papers are related to vector clocks, a classical mechanism in the context of distributed algorithms. The paper by M. Raynal shows on two examples first the usefulness and then the limits of vector clocks. The paper by L. Arantes et al. proposes an optimization related to vector clocks in the context of implementing lazy release consistency. Finally, the paper by G. Antonoiu and P.K. Srimani proposes a mutual exclusion algorithm based on self-stabilization, a paradigm for designing robust distributed algorithms. Two regular and two short papers are presented in the Distributed systems and middleware session. The paper by K. Drira et al. opens the session with an example of a middleware dedicated to multimedia services. The authors propose a multi-level structuring approach to solve cooperative interactions among CORBA objects. The Symphony environment described in the paper by R. Friedman et al. tackles the problem of dynamic reconfiguration of Internet services and provides an infrastructure for adapting servers according to the load. The Epidaure system (paper by D. Fezzani and J. Desbiens) uses the Java technology to provide a tool for building Distributed Artificial Intelligence applications. The last paper written by O. Richard and F. Cappello considers local networks and describes a high performance implementation of client/server interaction. We hope that these two sessions will lead to interesting and fruitful discussions.