Design Approach

  
Distributed File System Technology

The complexity of Aladdin lies in managing its size and growth. The vision of Aladdin is to mature to a globally embraced distributed network. Aladdin plans to push distributed file system (DFS) technology into a realm and size where it has had little experience. But, by leveraging the advantages of OpenAFS, Aladdin can take advantages of features such as client-side caching to improve performance, server-side replication to increase availability, and server location independence to ease network expansion2. OpenAFS is supported by a wide range of operating systems including Mac OS X and other distributions of Unix such as Solaris, Fedora Core and Ubuntu, which grants servers great flexibility in their choice of operating system. Therefore, the Aladdin will develop OpenAFS backends to implement its distributed network.

  
WebObjects Web-application

With the quantity of “soft computing resources” envisioned to be hosted on Aladdin servers, there comes a need to effectively administer the content on Aladdin. A small team of “resource administrators” can be easily overwhelmed with the task of updating and maintaining the massive amount of “soft computing resources” already available on the Internet. Therefore, hierarchically arranged resource administrators will be needed to maintain and grow Aladdin's content. This can be mitigated through the implementation of a Apple WebObjects-based web application, where resource administrators can do tasks such as authenticate, manage volunteers and resources, and delegate responsibility.

  
WebObjects Three-Tier Java Client Application

As Aladdin grows, the number of server machines needed to host “soft computing resources” will grow correspondingly. More volunteer server machines equates to increased redundancy/availability of current “soft computing resources”, as well as facilitating a greater capacity to add new “soft computing resources”. Therefore, support will be in place to administer aspects of file server machines from their inclusion in the Aladdin OpenAFS cell to selecting the content volumes to replicate on their hard disks. A java client three-tier network application using Apple frameworks is being developed to handle server administration.

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