Masterless Distributed Computing Over Mobile Devices.

摘要

It is obvious that information is becoming increasingly important in today's society. This can be seen by the widespread availability of high-speed Internet in homes and the ubiquity of smart phones. This new information- centric paradigm is possible because of a large supporting infrastructure without which the Internet, the volumes of information contained there, and the speed with which we can access that information would not exist. The military has recognized the potential value of this infrastructure because the greatest hindrance to any commander is the fog of war --the absence of the information necessary to make critical decisions. On the battlefield, the commander needs to know the status and location of all of his soldiers and the enemy's troops, and optimal strategies to accomplish the mission. Unfortunately, this information is currently impossible to obtain in a timely manner. This thesis addresses this problem by presenting an architecture for ad-hoc distributed computing among mobile devices. The system speeds up a distributed calculation, and does it in a way that does not rely on the presence of a routable network. The speedup obtained nears optimal as the size of the computation necessary to calculate an update increases. In addition, we have shown that we can chain distributed computations together, resulting in a decrease in the amount of time needed to perform a singular value decomposition (SVD), an important step in many data-mining algorithms.