Managing resources on a large-scale whether they are computing resources, data, events, bandwidth, requires some fully decentralized solutions. Our research in this area focuses on building the relevant overlay networks to provide core functionalities of resource management and discovery.

Querying large data collection over large scale  systems

Efficient search algorithms are crucial for a wide range of distributed applications.  We work in this area along two main directions: content-based event notification (or publish-subscribe) systems and generic query mechanisms.  We are currently working on several projects in this area exploring various way of organizing peers in an overlay. Among them:

  • VoroNet
  • Sub-2-Sub

Collaborative storage systems

The storage capacity of computers has increased a lot in the past years: in the meantime, final users have started using this storage for important personal data, with the democratization of digital cameras, and professional data, with the rise of home work. Backuping all this data has become a new challenge of P2P systems, since these users are connected most of the time, often with large unused storage capacity on their disks, and unfortunately seldom take the time to properly save these important data.

We are currently designing a platform for a collaborative backup system, and this problem tackles a large set of problems: making the backup resilient to the large number of failures characterizing P2P networks, choosing where to backup the data, designing the protocols to place and retrieve the data from the network, while ensuring secrecy/privacy of the data.

  • Palabre