A network management facility for a fault-tolerant distributed information retrieval system

grantor: University of TorontoThis thesis presents the design and implementation of a Network Management Layer to provide a group membership facility and an atomic modification facility that is typically required by distributed applications. The types of applications targetted are distributed information retrieval systems. The layer is designed to facilitate the addition of nodes that wish to become part of the system as well as the removal of members that have failed and are no longer useful. Furthermore, an atomic commitment facility is provided to allow the members to accomplish atomic operations ensuring system consistency. The Network Management Layer has been designed to be embedded into a more comprehensive layer, the Reliable Storage Management Layer, that manages the data for information retrieval systems in a fault-tolerant manner.M.Sc

A Reliable Storage Management Layer for

We present a storage management layer that facilitates the implementation of parallel information retrieval systems, and related applications, on networks of workstations. The storage management layer automates the process of adding and removing nodes, and implements a dispersed mirroring strategy to improve reliability. When nodes are added and removed, the document collection managed by the system is redistributed for load balancing purposes. The use of dispersed mirroring minimizes the impact of node failures and system modifications on query performance