arXiv subjects

Micah Beck

Publications and source records attributed to Micah Beck.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

How We Lost The Internet

In this paper we reexamine an assumption that underpinned the development of the Internet architecture, namely that a stateless and loosely synchronous point-to-point datagram delivery service would be sufficient to meet the needs of all network applications, including those which deliver content and services to a mass audience at global scale. Such applications are inherently asynchronous and point-to-multipoint in nature. We explain how the inability of distributed systems based on this stateless datagram service to provide adequate and affordable support for them within the public (I.e., universally shared and available) network led to the development of private overlay infrastructures, specifically Content Delivery Networks and distributed Cloud data centers. We argue that the burdens imposed by reliance on these private overlays may have been an obstacle to achieving the Open Data Networking goals of early Internet advocates. The contradiction between those initial goals and the exploitative commercial imperatives of hypergiant overlay operators is offered as a possibly important reason for the negative impact of their most profitable applications (e.g., social media) and monetization strategies (e.g., targeted advertisement). We propose that one important step in resolving this contradiction may be to reconsider the adequacy Internet's stateless datagram service model.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

How We Ruined The Internet

At the end of the 19th century the logician C.S. Peirce coined the term "fallibilism" for the "... the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy". In terms of scientific practice, this means we are obliged to reexamine the assumptions, the evidence, and the arguments for conclusions that subsequent experience has cast into doubt. In this paper we examine an assumption that underpinned the development of the Internet architecture, namely that a loosely synchronous point-to-point datagram delivery service could adequately meet the needs of all network applications, including those which deliver content and services to a mass audience at global scale. We examine how the inability of the Networking community to provide a public and affordable mechanism to support such asynchronous point-to-multipoint applications led to the development of private overlay infrastructure, namely CDNs and Cloud networks, whose architecture stands at odds with the Open Data Networking goals of the early Internet advocates. We argue that the contradiction between those initial goals and the monopolistic commercial imperatives of hypergiant overlay infrastructure operators is an important reason for the apparent contradiction posed by the negative impact of their most profitable applications (e.g., social media) and strategies (e.g., targeted advertisement). We propose that, following the prescription of Peirce, we can only resolve this contradiction by reconsidering some of our deeply held assumptions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

Exposed Buffer Architecture

The Internet stack is not a complete description of the resources and services needed to implement distributed applications, as it only accounts for communication services and the protocols that are defined to deliver them. This paper presents an account of the current distributed application architecture using a formal model of strictly layered systems, meaning that services in any layer can only depend on services in the layer immediately below it. By mapping a more complete Internet-based application stack that includes necessary storage and processing resources to this formal model, we are able to apply the Hourglass Theorem in order to compare alternative approaches in terms of their "deployment scalability." In particular, we contrast the current distributed application stack with Exposed Buffer Architecture, which has a converged spanning layer that allows for less-than-complete communication connectivity (exposing lower layer topology), but which also offers weak storage and processing services. This comparison shows that Exposed Buffer Architecture can have deployment scalability greater than the current distributed application stack while also providing minimally requisite storage and processing services.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

Is Universal Broadband Service Impossible?

Broadband Internet service is widely expected to be the fundamental universal service for the 21st century. But more than a decade of national and international struggles to close the digital divide between broadband haves and have nots suggest that reaching global universality will be a very difficult task. This paper argues that the strong guarantees made by the current broadband paradigm - low latency and constant availability - are unnecessary obstacles to its adoption as an affordable and universal digital service. We show that there is nonetheless a plausible strategy for deploying a Basic Broadband service that does not require such guarantees and is able to offer, at reasonable cost, almost all the critical and valuable services and applications currently delivered over low latency broadband, synchronous telepresence excepted.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Balls and Walls: A Compact Unary Coding for Bosonic States

We introduce a unary coding of bosonic occupation states based on the famous "balls and walls" counting for the number of configurations of $N$ indistinguishable particles on $L$ distinguishable sites. Each state is represented by an integer with a human readable bit string that has a compositional structure allowing for the efficient application of operators that locally modify the number of bosons. By exploiting translational and inversion symmetries, we identify a speedup factor of order $L$ over current methods when generating the basis states of bosonic lattice models. The unary coding is applied to a one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian with up to $L=N=20$, and the time needed to generate the ground state block is reduced to a fraction of the diagonalization time. For the ground state symmetry resolved entanglement, we demonstrate that variational approaches restricting the local bosonic Hilbert space could result in an error that scales with system size.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2021

Universal Digital Services Through Basic Broadband

In addressing the universal deployment of digital services it is necessary to decide on the breadth of "universality" and the type of functionality of "digital services". These two decisions are linked: certain desirable functionality does not lend itself to being implemented in some environments or with certain constraints. In this paper we define universality as achieving a level of universality in digital service that can bridge the digital divide not only throughout highly industrialized societies but also across the globe and in the face of disruption. We then argue that some of the characteristics of current Internet broadband service, in particular support for synchronous telepresence such as videoconferencing, is a barrier to implementation strategies that could enable cheap and resilient universal deploymen

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Cybercosm: New Foundations for a Converged Science Data Ecosystem

Scientific communities naturally tend to organize around data ecosystems created by the combination of their observational devices, their data repositories, and the workflows essential to carry their research from observation to discovery. However, these legacy data ecosystems are now breaking down under the pressure of the exponential growth in the volume and velocity of these workflows, which are further complicated by the need to integrate the highly data intensive methods of the Artificial Intelligence revolution. Enabling ground breaking science that makes full use of this new, data saturated research environment will require distributed systems that support dramatically improved resource sharing, workflow portability and composability, and data ecosystem convergence. The Cybercosm vision presented in this white paper describes a radically different approach to the architecture of distributed systems for data-intensive science and its application workflows. As opposed to traditional models that restrict interoperability by hiving off storage, networking, and computing resources in separate technology silos, Cybercosm defines a minimally sufficient hypervisor as a spanning layer for its data plane that virtualizes and converges the local resources of the system's nodes in a fully interoperable manner. By building on a common, universal interface into which the problems that infect today's data-intensive workflows can be decomposed and attacked, Cybercosm aims to support scalable, portable and composable workflows that span and merge the distributed data ecosystems that characterize leading edge research communities today.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Exposed Buffer Architecture for Continuum Convergence

Exposed Buffer Architecture addresses the problem of creating a programmable service platform for the digital continuum by reexamining the particular form of virtualization that is inherent to the Internet architecture. In the Internet stack below the Network Layer, the Link layer models services that are local to network nodes, or that connect them in local area networks. Aggregating these low level resources in the implementation of IP to create wide area services serves two different purposes: 1) It virtualizes local services, enabling interoperability through the adoption of a common model, and 2) It hides the topology of local infrastructure. The main premise of ExposedBuffer Architecture is that we can separate these two tasks, addressing the first with an invariant system model that provides a highly general, programmable platform for transcontinuum services, enabling a variety of approach to address the second.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2018

Interoperable Convergence of Storage, Networking, and Computation

In every form of digital store-and-forward communication, intermediate forwarding nodes are computers, with attendant memory and processing resources. This has inevitably stimulated efforts to create a wide-area infrastructure that goes beyond simple store-and-forward to create a platform that makes more general and varied use of the potential of this collection of increasingly powerful nodes. Historically, these efforts predate the advent of globally routed packet networking. The desire for a converged infrastructure of this kind has only intensified over the last 30 years, as memory, storage, and processing resources have increased in both density and speed while simultaneously decreasing in cost. Although there is a general consensus that it should be possible to define and deploy such a dramatically more capable wide-area platform, a great deal of investment in research prototypes has yet to produce a credible candidate architecture. Drawing on technical analysis, historical examples, and case studies, we present an argument for the hypothesis that in order to realize a distributed system with the kind of convergent generality and deployment scalability that might qualify as "future-defining," we must build it from a small set of simple, generic, and limited abstractions of the low level resources (processing, storage and network) of its intermediate nodes.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2016

On the Hourglass Model

The hourglass model is a widely used as a means of describing the design of the Internet, and can be found in the introduction of many modern textbooks. It arguably also applies to the design of other successful spanning layers, notably the Unix operating system kernel interface, meaning the primitive system calls and the interactions between user processes and the kernel. The impressive success of the Internet has led to a wider interest in using the hourglass model in other layered systems, with the goal of achieving similar results. However, application of the hourglass model has often led to controversy, perhaps in part because the language in which it has been expressed has been informal, and arguments for its validity have not been precise. Making a start on formalizing such an argument is the goal of this paper.

cs.NI↗