The Herald project is building a publish/subscribe event notification service deployed as a self-configuring federation of peers designed to scale to Internet size and to provide timely delivery of notifications.

• John Dunagan
• Mike Jones
• Alec Wolman

• Felipe Cabrera
• Krishna Gummadi (intern, Summer 2001)
• Nick Harvey (now an MIT graduate student)
• Dejan Kostic (intern, Summer 2003)
• Stefan Saroiu (intern, Summer 2002)
• Marvin Theimer
• Helen Wang

SkipNet and applications: SkipNet is an overlay network providing both practical locality properties and efficient communication. This release contains sources for the SkipNet overlay network and two other technologies built using it: the Overlook distributed name service, and the FUSE lightweight distributed failure notification system, plus applications exercising them. The SkipNet code and applications can be run in one of two environments: a simulation environment, in which all nodes run within a single program communicate via a simulated network topology, and a live or "cluster" environment, in which each node runs as a separate program and communicates with other nodes via TCP connections.

• John Dunagan, Nicholas J. A. Harvey, Michael B. Jones, Dejan Kostic, Marvin Theimer, Alec Wolman.  FUSE: Lightweight Guaranteed Distributed Failure Notification.  In Proceedings of the Sixth USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '04), December 2004.
• John Dunagan, Nicholas J.A. Harvey, Michael B. Jones, Marvin Theimer, and Alec Wolman.  Subscriber/Volunteer Trees: Polite, Efficient Overlay Multicast Trees.  Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2004-131, December 2004.
• Michael B. Jones and John Dunagan.  Engineering Realities of Building a Working Peer-to-Peer System.  Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2004-54, June 2004.
• Nicholas J. A. Harvey and J. Ian Munro.  Deterministic SkipNet.  In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '03), July 2003.
• Miguel Castro, Michael B. Jones, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Antony Rowstron, Marvin Theimer, Helen Wang, and Alec Wolman.  An Evaluation of Scalable Application-Level Multicast Built Using Peer-To-Peer Overlays.  In Proceedings of Infocom 2003, April 2003.
• Nicholas J. A. Harvey, Michael B. Jones, Stefan Saroiu, Marvin Theimer, and Alec Wolman. SkipNet: A Scalable Overlay Network with Practical Locality Properties.  In Proceedings of Fourth USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS '03), March 2003.  Received Best Paper Award.
• Nicholas J. A. Harvey, Michael B. Jones, Marvin Theimer, and Alec Wolman. Efficient Recovery From Organizational Disconnect in SkipNet.  2^nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS '03), February 2003.
• Michael B. Jones, Marvin Theimer, Helen Wang, and Alec Wolman. Unexpected Complexity: Experiences Tuning and Extending CAN.  Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2002-118, December 2002.
• Nicholas J. A. Harvey, John Dunagan, Michael B. Jones, Stefan Saroiu, Marvin Theimer, and Alec Wolman. SkipNet: A Scalable Overlay Network with Practical Locality Properties.  Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2002-92, December 2002.
• Marvin Theimer and Michael B. Jones. Overlook: Scalable Name Service on an Overlay Network. In Proceedings of the 22^nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Vienna, Austria, IEEE Computer Society, July 2002.
• Luis Felipe Cabrera, Michael B. Jones, and Marvin Theimer. Herald: Achieving a Global Event Notification Service. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VIII), Elmau, Germany. IEEE Computer Society, May 2001.

The Herald project is being conducted by members of the Systems and Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond. We are also closely collaborating on several aspects of Herald with members of the Pastry and Scribe projects at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.