[Colloq] PhD Proposal **Tuesday, July 8, 10am, 151 CN**

[Rachel Bates]

Date:     July 8, 2003
Time:     10:00 am
Location: 151 Cullinane Hall

Thesis Proposal: Online Scaling of Shared-nothing Parallel Databases

by Xiaowei Sun

Advisor:   Prof. Betty Salzberg
Committee: Prof. Gene Cooperman
           Prof. Rajmohan Rajaraman
           Prof. Donghui Zhang

Abstract:

The current demand for scalability leads to an architecture of loosely
coupled computer nodes (shared-nothing parallel system) which can be
expanded or contracted at will, merely by adding or deleting nodes. In
addition to the traditional load balancing issues which may involve
data migration, data needs to be redistributed as a consequence
of such change in system settings. Furthermore, the demand for 24/7
availability leads to requirements for online reorganization. Ideally
the system should never be unavailable but the system needs to be able
to expand and change.

In this talk I present my research on hash-based data distribution
algorithms that facilitates efficient scaling with good load balancing,
and algorithms for online (concurrent with user accesses) data migration
and incremental index updating.