TITLE: Promise Pipelining: Distributed Programming Made Practical
SPEAKER: Mark Miller [HP Labs]
DATE: 2:00 - 3:00 P.M., Thursday March 25, 2004
LOCATION: Sigma, 1 L (PA)
HOST: Vinay Deolalikar
ABSTRACT:
The conventional concurrency control model -- shared memory multithreading
with fine-grained locking -- is deceptively hard. Although many people have
learned this model, few have learned -- or could learn -- how to write
complex correct programs in this model. A correct program must maintain
consistency while avoiding deadlock. Further, when extended to distributed
systems, threads lead one into inefficient synchronous communication
patterns.
Promise pipelining is the concurrency and distributed computation model of
the E language, and made available to Java programs through the ELib
library. Starting from any sequential object oriented programming language,
promise pipelining adds only two operators -- the "eventual send"
and the
"when-catch" -- to support deadlock-free, latency-tolerant,
transactional,
communicating event loops. We demonstrate how Causeway, our distributed
debugger, by shifting our view from "follow the process" to
"follow the
messages", shows us causal paths of interest independent of machine
boundaries.
Complex yet robust distributed systems have been created rapidly in E,
including a decentralized secure social virtual reality system, a toy stock
market, and a distributed secure desktop and file manager.
Bio:
Mark S. Miller is the Chief Architect of the Virus Safe Computing
Initiative, a skunkworks project at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, and is the
Open Source Coordinator of the E Project at http://www.erights.org.
He is a
designer of several distributed secure programming languages including
Vulcan for Xerox PARC, Trusty Scheme for AutoDesk, Joule for Agorics and
Fujitsu, Tclio for Sun Labs, and E for Electric Communities, ERights.org,
and Combex. As founder and CTO of Combex, Mark fashioned E into the platform
used for CapDesk -- a Darpa-sponsored prototype of a virus-safe distributed
desktop and application launching framework.
Mark was drawn into concurrency control by pursuit of another dream. He is a
co-creator of the agoric paradigm of market-based adaptive distributed
secure computation. He is also a founder of Agorics, a company started to
capitalize on agoric computing ideas.
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