EAGER: From Clarity to Efficiency for Distributed Algorithms

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

Distributed algorithms are the foundation of distributed systems, which are an important part of the nation's computer infrastructure. Developing correct and robust implementations of such algorithms is a difficult task. This research project is an ambitious effort to address the problem of programming distributed algorithms by raising the level of abstraction. The investigators will develop a novel very-high-level language, called DistAlgo, for writing distributed algorithms. This language will make it easier to clearly express distributed algorithms and will provide a useful pedagogical notation for teaching distributed programming. The investigators will develop optimizations that will allow efficient implementations to be generated from DistAlgo programs. Thus, this work will bridge the gap between the pseudocode that is typically used to describe distributed algorithms and the efficient implementations of such algorithms. The optimizations are based on automatic incrementalization techniques applied to the logical descriptions of process states and histories. The investigators will evaluate their approach by applying it to well known distributed algorithms.