The Ninja Architecture for Robust Internet-Scale Systems and Services

Steven D. Gribble, Matt Welsh
Rob von Behren, Eric A. Brewer
David Culler, Nikita Borisov
Steve CzerwinskiRamakrishna Gummadi,
Jason Hill, Anthony Joseph
Randy Katz, Z. Morley Mao
Steve Ross, Ben Zhao

IEEE Computer Networks
Special Issue on Pervasive Computing, March 2001, Vol 35, No. 4
Best paper award

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Paper Abstract


The Ninja project seeks to enable the broad innovation of robust, scalable, distributed Internet services, and to permit the emerging class of extremely heterogeneous devices to seamlessly access these services. Our architecture consists of four basic elements: bases, which are powerful workstation cluster environments with a software platform that simplifies scalable services construction; units, which are the devices by which users access the services; active proxies, which are transformational elements taht are used for unit- or service-specific adaptation; and paths, which are an abstraction through which units, services, and active proxies are composed.