The Anthill Project

Publications Page

The main ideas about Anthill have been published in a few conferences and workshops. The original paper presenting Anthill is Anthill: a Framework for the Design and the Analysis of Peer-to-Peer Systems, presented at the 4th European Research Seminar on Advances in Distributed Systems (ERSADS '01), Bertinoro, Italy (May 2001). This workshop paper has been later expanded in a conference paper (Anthill: A Framework for the Development of Agent-Based Peer-to-Peer Systems), presented at the 22th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '02), Vienna, Austria (July 2002). An extended version of this paper has also been published as a Technical Report of the University of Bologna (UBLCS-2001-09, revised August 2002).

So far, two different applications have been implemented over Anthill:

• Gnutant is a file-sharing application. In order to facilitate file searches, Gnutant builds a distributed file index scattered across the nest network, whose task is to store URLs for shared files, together with routing information needed to navigate through the index. The index is constructed at runtime by Gnutant ants, that travel through the network collecting information about new and existing files and insert this information in the index. A short description of Gnutant is provided in UBLCS-2001-09. A technical report containing a complete description of Gnutant is in preparation.
• Messor is a grid computing system aimed at supporting the concurrent execution of highly-parallel, time-intensive computations, in which the workload may be decomposed into a large number of independent jobs. The computational power offered by a network of Anthill nests is exploited by Messor by assigning a set of jobs comprising a computation to a dispersed set of nests. The Messor algorithm has been described in Messor: Load-Balancing through a Swarm of Autonomous Agents, presented at the 1st International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, Bologna, Italy, July 2002

The philosophy behind Anthill and its relation to the complex adaptive system area are explained in two workshop papers. The first paper (Towards Self-Organizing, Self-Repairing and Resilient Peer-to-Peer Systems, in Proc. of the International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Computing, Networking 2002, Pisa, Italy, Maggio 2002) contains the first description of Messor. The second paper (Toward Self-Organizing, Self-Repairing and Resilient Large-Scale Distributed Systems, in Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Future Directions in Distributed Computing, Bertinoro, Forlì, Italy, June 2002) discusses how complex adaptive systems may be one of the future trends of distributed computing.

JXTAnthill is discussed in Francesco Russo's master thesis. Francesco is (now a graduated) student who developed the JXTA runtime environment.