Massivizing Computer Systems: a Vision to Understand, Design, and Engineer Computer Ecosystems through and beyond Modern Distributed Systems
It addresses the societal dependence on computer ecosystems, highlighting issues like accessibility and affordability, but is incremental as it builds on existing distributed systems concepts.
The paper identifies the challenges of large-scale distributed computer ecosystems and proposes the vision of Massivizing Computer Systems as a new domain in computer science to understand, design, and engineer these systems.
Our society is digital: industry, science, governance, and individuals depend, often transparently, on the inter-operation of large numbers of distributed computer systems. Although the society takes them almost for granted, these computer ecosystems are not available for all, may not be affordable for long, and raise numerous other research challenges. Inspired by these challenges and by our experience with distributed computer systems, we envision Massivizing Computer Systems, a domain of computer science focusing on understanding, controlling, and evolving successfully such ecosystems. Beyond establishing and growing a body of knowledge about computer ecosystems and their constituent systems, the community in this domain should also aim to educate many about design and engineering for this domain, and all people about its principles. This is a call to the entire community: there is much to discover and achieve.