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December 2008 Calendar

CS Masters' Thesis Defense

Title: Distributed Computing Using STAF
Speaker: Sachin Shah
Date: Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: GMCS 405
Thesis advisor: Dr Roger Whitney

Abstract:
Distributed computing is used to solve complex problems such as finding existence of extraterrestrial entities in the universe, looking for prime numbers so large that they have more than ten million digits, and to find more effective drugs to fight cancer and the AIDS virus. These projects are so large, and require so much computing power to solve, that they would be impossible for any single computer or person to solve in a reasonable amount of time. Distributed computing makes it possible by using processing cycles of millions of users' desktops.

When developing a distributed system, most common challenges encountered are support for multiple platforms, scalability, security, high availability and predictable performance. This study tries to solve these challenges by using Software Testing Automation Framework (STAF). STAF is an open source, multi-platform, multi-language and extendible framework designed around the concept of services.

The goal of this thesis is to measure the scalability and performance of a distributed system using STAF. An external service for STAF is developed using Java as part of this study to handle distributed computing tasks.
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