Thesis for October 1998

Research Group: Solidor

Location: IRISA, Campus universitaire de Beaulieu, 35042 Rennes Cedex FRANCE

Supervisor: F. André (phone : 02 99 84 71 73, e-mail : fandre@irisa.fr)

Keywords: wide-area, large scale distributed systems, multimedia information system, Internet, adaptive environment of execution.

Subject: Exponential growth of Internet combined with the development of mobile computers change the point of view of traditional distributed systems. User with a mobile computer can connect from different places, and each time, has a new potential environment of execution due to different resources (hardware and software), which can be used to overcome poor mobile resources (disk capacity, computing power...).
Adaptability and reactivity toward these dynamic changes is key-performance of such systems which must be able to support multimedia applications generally using important computing and storage capacities.

Study subject is to design and developed an adaptive environment for distributed execution of applications on Internet. It consists, on one hand, of the design of a storage service providing coherence et permanency of data, and on the other hand, of an adaptive service of distributed calculation. This part will be compound of the following steps : (i) characterization of a context for distributed application (ii) dynamic detection of context changes in function of the mobility of users involved, (iii) dynamic adaptation of applications in this new distributed environment (this point will range over distributed application reconfiguration, load balancing in a specific context, software and hardware adaptation, software and hardware heterogeneousness ...). Then, this system can be applied and tested via a service of electronic information on Internet.