CACHE ADVANCE

Micah Beck, director of the University of Tennessee's Logistical Computing and Internetworking Lab, helped develop the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP), which allows network users to share temporary data storage space the way they share bandwidth on IP networks. He shared some of his personal data with us.

On the future of shared storage: Suppose you and I are passing digital objects to each other using the Internet. We'd have to build a cache into our end system and store them locally. Suppose my end doesn't have storage available. I'm in an airport working on my PDA. What if they provisioned storage in this airport like they provision wireless? My PDA would be able to store those objects close by and start a caching policy. You wouldn't have to build out your own infrastructure for every single application.

On IBP: We'd like to see protocols that require caching built on top of IBP. People wouldn't have to deploy caching; they would just put it into their protocols. But getting HTTP rewritten to put objects into IBP is a big step. Realistically, people who need to store data while multicasting will use IBP.

On video: Caching video is hard. You have to build specific caches that understand the video protocol. In one IBP demo, we stored video in servers spread throughout the network, splitting up the video into different servers and downloading it from multiple servers at once. Because we were doing parallel work, we got very high-bandwidth video delivery, and we did it without server accounts. We were downloading at up to 20 or 30 Mb/s, encoding at 15 Mb/s. And that's not the limit. We expect to be able to push this to at least 100 Mb/s, which is getting into the area of HDTV.

On storage vendors: A simple IBP storage device could be used in very sophisticated ways by an external scheduler. That might have an impact on all the companies with highly functional storage boxes that rely on the fact that, in order to get a lot of functionality, people have to buy the whole box. Their customers will have another choice.

On what's next: When IBP 2.0 comes, it's likely to address computational resources, so if you need to transform the data in some way, you can allocate resources out on the network to do it. Maybe my client is expecting data in a visual form, and I have it in a textual form. Currently it would have to be changed at the client's end or at my end. I'd like to be able to do it in the middle.

DOSSIER MICAH BECK

Occupation: Research Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee and Director of its Logistical Computing and Internetworking Laboratory (LoCI)

Place of residence: Knoxville, Tenn.

Current reading: “The Austere Academy: A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book Five” by Lemony Snicket

Favorite Web site: Internet radio site www.kexp.org. “I listen to it all the time.”

Next project: IBP 2.0