Neptune: Programming and Runtime Support for Cluster-based Network Services

This talk presents the Neptune project that addresses the system and programming-level issues in building high performance and reliable runtime support for online services and data-intensive applications. Online applications differ from their offline counterpart in the performance sensitivity to highly concurrent workload and the availability requirement. Programming such applications is challenging in achieving high performance, reliability, and efficient resource management.

Neptune is a middleware system that allows services to be aggregated and deployed quickly on a cluster of workstations and SMPs. It shields application programmers from the complexities of replication, service discovery, failure detection and recovery, and resource management. The techniques investigated are architecture and programming support for thread/process based concurrency, quality-aware service differentiation, parallel data aggregation, and replica consistency management with staleness control.

This talk will also discuss the use of Neptune in Internet search at Ask Jeeves and Teoma.

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Tao Yang is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California at Santa Barbara. He has also been the Chief Scientist for Teoma and Ask Jeeves since 2000 for directing research and development of Internet search engines. His research interests are parallel and distributed systems, high performance scientific computing, and Internet search.