Review of Grapevine

From: Nathan Dire (ndire_at_cs.washington.edu)
Date: Mon Feb 02 2004 - 16:28:38 PST

  • Next message: Raz Mathias: "Review: Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System"

    In "Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System",
    Schroeder, et al, present their experience with the Grapevine distributed
    system running on Xerox's research internet. Grapevine provides message
    delivery, naming, authentication, resource location, and access control
    services. The authors saw the system grow from 5 servers and 1500 individuals
    in the fall of 1981 to 17 servers and 4400 individuals by the summer of 1983.
    This paper summarizes observations about the ability of Grapevine to handle
    this growth.

    Grapevine consists of three basic components: the registration service, the
    message service, and the GrapevineUser package. Each Grapevine server runs a
    message server program and a registration server program. The registration
    service handles naming, authentication, access control and resource location.
    It stores the name to location mapping for the various resources the the
    system. This database is distributed into individual registries that handle
    some subset of names in the system. The message service employs the
    registration service to deliver messages to individuals and groups in the
    system. The messages are buffer on servers for retrieval by the recipient.
    The GrapevineUser package handles communication with the Grapevine servers so
    that Grapevine appears as a single service.

    The authors make several observations about the scalability, configuration,
    consistency, and reliability of the system. All of these issues remain
    relevant to current distributed systems, and many of the problems still exist.
    The problem of distribution list growth in Grapevine strongly foreshadows the
    current problem with e-mail spam. The problem with balancing load in the face
    of failure is reflected in recent research with quality of service (QoS)
    guarantees. The problem of consistency in the registry database also remain
    relevant to modern systems.

    It's clear that Grapevine had a strong influence on many distributed systems
    which came later. I see a lot in common with DNS and NIS. I suspect many of
    the principles in the discussion of geography and organizational structure
    would be found in a current guide to configuring similar services provided by
    Microsoft, Sun, or Novell in a large enterprise. In fact, it's somewhat
    disappointing that so little has changed in 20 years.

    As for the Grapevine system itself, I think it reflects a solid approach to
    implementing an internet-scale distributed system. I would like to know more
    about the security model, since it sounds like Xerox's internet was isolated,
    and most enterprises would employ the public internet for such a service if
    installed today. Also, I think the registry would have benefited from a more
    flexible design. Ideally, the partitioning and replication would be more
    dynamic so that better schemes could be implemented without changes to the
    software or major changes to the system configuration.


  • Next message: Raz Mathias: "Review: Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System"

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