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Fiscal 1994 Project Portfolio Report
Peter Norvig, Principal Investigator
peter.norvig@East.Sun.COM
Overall Objective
To develop caching and other strategies to make high-volume information
delivery scale gracefully in the presence of storage and transmission
constraints.
Objective for FY94
To deal with the problem of information delivery at the enterprise level. This
means two things:
- Managing network resources so that files are cached near the users who
want them, and the bandwidth of available connections is used wisely.
- Managing the user's access to information so that a user can make a query
without having to know where the answer will be found.
Description
To build a federation of HyperText Transport Protocol (http) servers that will
cache files locally to lessen the strain on the network presented by the popular Mosaic browser. Once the caching servers are in place we can analyze statistics gathered by them and do a series of experiments, such as:
- Sharing cache information between machines that are connected by a high-
speed connection.
- Invalidating caches of neighboring machines by proactively sending a
message.
- Supporting a query interface whereby the caching servers will communicate
among themselves to see what servers may have an answer to the query.
Accomplishments
- Took an existing public-domain http server, made it work properly with the
Sun firewall, and repackaged it for easy deployment within Sun. This
quickly became the standard server throughout the Sun Wide Area Network (SWAN).
- Took an existing public-domain http server with caching and proxy
capabilities, extended its capabilities, and instrumented it to keep statistics. This too has been packaged for easy installation and is being picked up
throughout the SWAN.
- Established an SML East http caching server for organizing local
information and experimenting with new server features. It is has been in
everyday use since March 1994.
- Produced a demo for SunExpress where we provided a searchable set of
pages for their on-line catalog. They were very impressed and have assigned
people to work on a more polished version. We are serving a consultant role
in this project.
- Helped organize http pages for SML on both coasts, and kept in touch with
the major players in the Sun's other operating companies, through mailing
lists and by private conversations.
- Built two navigation companion graphical interfaces that try to show the user
what the space of documents is like. We have shifted away from this focus,
partly because we believe that third parties will be coming out with such products shortly.
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