Design and Implementation of Adaptive Message Passing Systems for Wide-Area Distributed Computing Environments

Recently, much research has gone into wide-area message passing systems, but more work is necessary so that message passing systems can adapt to wide-area environments by themselves and stop requiring manual configuration. Thus, in this paper, I make two proposals concerning the design and implementation of adaptive message passing systems for wide-area, distributed environments. My first proposal is a method for message passing systems to establish connections and perform routing in a wide-area-aware manner. Given just the list of end points, each process autonomously discovers which connections are blocked by firewalls, and establishes a subset of the connections that are not blocked. In determining which subset to establish, processes use latency information obtained at run-time to limit the number of wide-area connections. Moreover, processes perform routing so that all processes can communicate with each other, even when some nodes are behind firewalls or only have private IP a...