Today, hardly any computer functions in isolation. There is a strong and on-going trend to distribute computing tasks to systems of networked computers. PCs, smartphones, smart electric meters or washing machines: none of these devices would be very useful without computer networks and remote services.

Leslie Lamport, one of the founding fathers of distributed systems, boiled it down to this statement:

You know you have [a distributed system] when the crash of a computer you’ve never heard of stops you from getting any work done.

Upcoming trends will even increase this effect: cloud-computing, wireless sensor networks and connected vehicles all rely on networking and distributed computing as an absolute requirement for almost every IT system. This, however, leads to a number of problems that computer science needs to address and solve:

These requirements pose fascinating challenges to distributed systems research even after decades of research. At the Institute of Distributed Systems, we are ready and eager to address these in our work.

In our vision, future distributed systems will scale to very large dimensions while processing sensitive data reliably and securely, manage themselves in a self-organizing way, and possess an inherent simplicity that makes them understandable and accessible both from a developer, management, and user perspective.

In order to implement this vision, our work is concerned with the following working areas: