Large-Scale Distributed Computing and Applications: Models and Trends

Many applications follow the distributed computing paradigm, in which parts of the application are executed on different network-interconnected computers. The extension of these applications in terms of number of users or size has led to an unprecedented increase in the scale of the infrastructure that supports them. Large-Scale Distributed Computing and Applications: Models and Trends offers a coherent and realistic image of today's research results in large scale distributed systems, explains state-of-the-art technological solutions for the main issues regarding large scale distributed systems, and presents the benefits of using large scale distributed systems and the development process of scientific and commercial distributed applications.

Valentin Cristea (author and coordinator) is a professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University Politehnica of Bucharest (UPB). He teaches several courses on Distributed Systems and Algorithms. The course Distributed Computing in Internet delivered to master degree students is close to the subject of the proposed book. Also, as a PhD supervisor he directs several thesis on Grids and Distributed Computing. The co-authors of this proposal are among his former or actual PhD students. Valentin Cristea is Director of the National Center for Information Technology of UPB and leads the laboratories of Collaborative High Performance Computing and eBusiness. He is an IT Expert of the World Bank, Coordinator of national and international projects in IT, member of program committees of several IT Conferences (IWCC, ISDAS, ICT, etc), reviewer of ACM. He directs R&D projects in collaboration with multinational IT Companies (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun) and national companies (RomSys, UTI).

Ciprian Dobre, PhD, is assistant professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University Politehnica of Bucharest (UPB). The main fields of expertise are Grid Computing, Monitoring and Control of Distributed Systems, Modeling and Simulation, Networking, Parallel and Distributed Algorithms. He is involved in a number of national projects (CNCSIS, GridMOSI, MedioGRID, PEGAF) and international projects (MonALISA, MONARC, VINCI, VNSim, EGEE, SEE-GRID, EU-NCIT). He is actively collaborating with Oracle from which he received a PhD grant of excellence. His PhD thesis was oriented on Large Scale Distributed System Simulation. His research activities were awarded with the Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental Applications in 2008 by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives (CENIC).

Corina Stratan, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Systems Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, working on resource selection in large scale distributed systems. In 2008 she obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania; her PhD research was focused on monitoring and performance analysis in distributed systems. During the PhD studies she contributed to several national and international projects, and was a teaching assistant for courses like Parallel/Distributed Algorithms and Communication Protocols. She received IBM PhD Fellowship awards in 2006 and 2007 and worked as a summer intern at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Florin Pop, PhD, is assistant professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University Politehnica of Bucharest. His research interests are oriented to: scheduling in Grid environments (his PhD research), distributed system, parallel computation, communication protocols and numerical methods. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 2008 with Magna cum laudae distinction. He is member of RoGrid consortium and participates in several research projects in these domains, in collaboration with other universities and research centers from Romania and from abroad developer (in the national projects like CNCSIS, GridMOSI, MedioGRID and international project like EGEE, SEE-GRID, EU-NCIT). He has received an IBM PhD Assistantship in 2006 (top ranked 1st in CEMA out from 17 awarded students) and a PhD Excellency grant from Oracle in 2006-2008.