Timothy Roscoe received a PhD from the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, where he was a principal designer and builde rof the Nemesis operating system, as well as working on the Wanda microkernel and Pandora multimedia system. After three years working on web-based collaboration systems at an Internet startup company in North Carolina, Mothy joined Sprint's Advanced Technology Lab in Burlingame, California, as a researcher, where he worked on application hosting platforms, networking monitoring, and assorted systems management and security problems. Mothy joined Intel Research at Berkeley in April 2002, and has been a principal architect of PlanetLab, an open, shared platform for developing and deploying planetary-scale services. His current research interests include distributed query processing and its relationship to network routing; network architecture; and high-performance operating systems.

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Saarbrücken

Overlay networks are used today in a variety of distributed systems ranging from file-sharing and storage systems to communication infrastructures. Overlays of various kinds have recently received considerable attention in the networked systems research community, partly due to the availability of the PlanetLab planetary-scale application platform. However, a broader historical perspective is that overlay functionality has implicitly long been a significant component of wide-area distributed systems.

Despite this, designing, building and adapting these overlays to an intended application and the target environment is a difficult and time consuming process.

To ease the development and the deployment of such overlay networks, my research group at Intel Berkeley in conjunction with the University of California at Berkeley is building P2, a system which uses a declarative logic language to express the overlay networks in a highly compact and reusable form. P2 can express a Narada-style mesh network in 13 rules, and the Chord structured overlay in only 35 rules. P2 directly parses and executes such specifications using a dataflow architecture to construct and maintain the overlay networks. I'll describe the P2 approach, how our implementation works, and give some experimental results showing that the performance and robustness of P2 overlays is acceptable.

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