Efficient hierarchic management for reconfiguration of networked information systems

The management of modern distributed systems is complicated by scale and dynamics. Scalable, decoupled communication establishes flexible, loosely coupled component relationships, and these relationships help meet the present demands on management. However, traditional decoupled addressing mechanisms tend to focus the addressing on only one of the parties involved in communication while, in general, a communication relationship involves a sender, communicated content, and receivers. The state of all three are simultaneously relevant to correctness of a management relationship and its communications. We introduce selective notification, a scalable, decoupled event dissemination architecture supporting simultaneous and combined addressing of senders, receivers, and events. We demonstrate its application to programming dynamic, scalable management relationships. We then discuss its implementation, and present measurements of its effective capabilities.