Future Directions in Distributed Computing

This book presents a collection of 38 position and research papers surveying the future landscape of research in distributed computing, written by the participants of the Workshop on Future Directions in Distributed Computing, held in Bertinoro, Italy in June 2002. The papers are grouped into four topical sections. The first deals with foundations of distributed computing. The second section surveys research issues in novel communication and network services. The third section is about data, file services, coherence, and replication in network computing. The last section deals with system and application issues. The book also includes two papers presenting insights into technological and social processes that are part of the development of the distributed computing technology. All in all, the book contains a plethora of research topics that are targets of future research or that are already being addressed by forward-looking research in distributed computing. The book was written to be a source of inspiration for researchers and a source of motivation for graduate students interested in entering the exciting research field of distributed computing.