topics in distributed systems

Question

what do you think is an interesting topic in distributed systems.
i should pic a topic and present it on monday. at first i chose to talk about Wuala, but after reading about it, i don't think its that interesting.
so what is an interesting (new) topic in distributed systems that i can research about.
sorry if this is the wrong place to post.

Answer 1

Take for example a database like Cassandra with the following features:

• Decentralized: Every node in the cluster is identical. There are no network bottlenecks. There are no single points of failure.
• Elastic: Read and write throughput both increase linearly as new machines are added, with no downtime or interruption to applications.
• Fault Tolerant: Data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes for fault-tolerance. Replication across multiple data centers is supported. Failed nodes can be replaced with no downtime.
• Consistent, Eventually: Cassandra implements an eventually consistent model and includes sophisticated features such as Hinted Handoff and Read Repair to minimize inconsistency windows.
• Highly Availabile: Writes and reads offer a tunable ConsistencyLevel, all the way from "writes never fail" to "block for all replicas to be readable," with the quorum level in the middle.

I think you could hold a semester of lectures on just solving problems encountered creating such a system and/or making it high-performance. As a bonus, the topic is of wide interest (anyone writing applications for the web, basically) and already partly known so you have a good chance to capture the attention of a crowd of developers.