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Globule: an Open-Source Content Distribution Network



Globule Logo Replica, n. A reproduction of a work of art, by the artist that made the original. It is so called to distinguish it from a "copy," which is made by another artist. When the two are made with equal skill the replica is the more valuable, for it is supposed to be more beautiful than it looks.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


Introduction

Globule is a third-party module for the Apache Web server that allows a given server to replicate its documents to other Globule servers. It takes care of maintaining consistency between the replicas, of monitoring the servers, and of automatically redirecting clients to one of the available replicas. Globule also supports the replication of PHP documents. It runs on Unix and Windows systems.

Additional information about Globule can be found in these papers:

* A (slightly outdated) 2-pages long paper summarizing Globule's features.
* A more in-depth paper describing Globule's architecture as a collaborative content delivery network.

News

19th September 2008: The Globule project is now finished, but the Globule veterans seem to be doing quite well! After being involved in the design of Amazon's Dynamo, Swami hit the news again, being one of the masterminds behind Amazon's new CDN service. Well done, Swami!
20th April 2007: Our first two PhD students successfully defended their theses!
  • Michal Szymaniak came first and defended his thesis titled Latency-Driven Replication for Globally Distributed Systems on April 17th.
  • The next day, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian defended his thesis titled Scalable Hosting of Web Applications.
Both of them did a fantastic job and greatly contributed to the success of the Globule project. Many thanks to them!
5th July 2006: We released Globule-1.3.2. No new feature but many bug fixes, including a major one regarding shared memory management. We recommend that you update your servers as soon as possible!
14th April 2006: We changed the Globule logo! The Apache software foundation kindly asked us to stop using the Apache feather as part of our logo, so we replaced the feathers with tulips. We expect that this will emphasize the "Dutchness" of the Globule project, despite a majority of its members being non-Dutch ;-)

Older news are still available here.

new Download mod-globule-1.3.2 new

* Download this masterpiece
* Read the documentation
* Register to the mailing-lists
* Report bugs to bugzilla.globule.org
* Register your server at the Globule broker service and find new servers where to host your replicas!

Project Members

* Maarten van Steen (professor)
* Guillaume Pierre (assistant professor)
* Paolo Costa (postdoc)
* Swaminathan Sivasubramanian (PhD student)
* Michal Szymaniak (PhD student)
* Guido Urdaneta (PhD student)
* Berry van Halderen (scientific programmer)

Globule Meetings

A number of talks have been scheduled about work being conducted in the Globule and GlobeSoul projects. Everyone is invited. Never mind the page is located at the GlobeSoul site, these talks should ideally be renamed the Globule/Globesoul talks (or maybe the GlobeSoul/Globule talks?) :-)

Available Positions

* Master's term projects (afstudeerprojecten)

Selected Publications

See also: our full publication list

* A general presentation of Globule:
    Globule: a Collaborative Content Delivery Network. Guillaume Pierre and Maarten van Steen. IEEE Communications Magazine 44(8), August 2006.
 
* About dynamic selection of replication strategies:
    Dynamically Selecting Optimal Distribution Strategies for Web Documents. Guillaume Pierre, Maarten van Steen and Andrew S. Tanenbaum. In IEEE Transactions on Computers 51(6), pp. 637-651, June 2002.
 
* A survey of Web content distribution networks:
    Replication for Web Hosting Systems. Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Michal Szymaniak, Guillaume Pierre and Maarten van Steen, in ACM Computing Surveys 36(3), September 2004.


gpierre@cs.vu.nl