I guess the first thing I should do is to clarify what this blog is all about. There are way too many interesting things to read and I am not selfish enough to keep you around if you might end up finding this is not worth your time.
To begin with, I am a scientist working on distributed systems (basically, collections of computers talking to each other to achieve a common goal) and the networks that bring them together.
Most of my work (and my group’s) focuses on large-scale distributed systems - systems that pull together hundreds to millions of users, across large geographic areas and different administrative domains. Examples of them appear regularly in the news, for one reason or another, and include things like BitTorrent, Facebook, Second Life, SETI@Home, P2P Next, Skype, Google and Akamai, just to name a few.
The success and popularity of these systems have been pushing my research community’s understanding of how to design them, how to implement them, how to test them and how to monitor their execution when we finally deploy them. They have also exposed an underlying network we do not know or quite understand and which we have been having a hard time characterizing.
This class of distributed systems, their opportunities and the challenges associated with them as well as the general environment affecting and being affected by them (politics, economy, law, …) will be/is the main theme of this blog.
