Large Scale Network-Centric Distributed Systems

Preface

On one hand, the cost of computing resources has decreased rapidly, and on the other hand, the availability of them has increased swiftly in recent years. In the meanwhile, a great amount of intensive applications with greater performance and fault tolerance requirements has emerged. These trends collectively have made centralized designs of the information systems less desirable and distributed systems more widespread in several domains, despite them having more technical difficulties. Obviously, it is the network that sticks the components of such systems together, and it has become apparent that the effectiveness of the operation of the network together with the way it is exploited, primarily determines the quality of the cooperation of those components. Today, network centric computing systems is a subject of interest in the whole extent to which distributed systems operate, from those which are composed of multiple cores on a single chip to those which take advantage of a great number of computers connected together in order to create grids, clouds, and other network-based distributed systems.

In this book, a range of relevant topics in the scope of Large Scale Network-Centric Distributed Systems is presented, which covers a selection of its many aspects. It is composed of five parts, each of which includes different chapters authored by the researchers in the field and selected based on a peer-review. A brief summary of the chapters is provided below to give an initiatory ...