Abstract not found

Hash tables – which map “keys ” onto “values” – are an essential building block in modern software systems. We believe a similar functionality would be equally valuable to large distributed systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Content-Addressable Network (CAN) as a distributed

Abstract not found

Dryad is a general-purpose distributed execution engine for coarse-grain data-parallel applications. A Dryad applica-tion combines computational “vertices ” with communica-tion “channels ” to form a dataflow graph. Dryad runs the application by executing the vertices of this graph on a set of available computers, communicating as appropriate through files, TCP pipes, and shared-memory FIFOs. The vertices provided by the application developer are quite simple and are usually written as sequential programs with no thread creation or locking. Concurrency arises from Dryad scheduling vertices to run simultaneously on multi-ple computers, or on multiple CPU cores within a computer. The application can discover the size and placement of data at run time, and modify the graph as the computation pro-gresses to make efficient use of the available resources. Dryad is designed to scale from powerful multi-core sin-gle computers, through small clusters of computers, to data centers with thousands of computers. The Dryad execution engine handles all the difficult problems of creating a large distributed, concurrent application: scheduling the use of computers and their CPUs, recovering from communication or computer failures, and transporting data between ver-tices.

Robust and powerful software instrumentation tools are essential for program analysis tasks such as profiling, performance evaluation, and bug detection. To meet this need, we have developed a new instrumentation system called Pin. Our goals are to provide easy-to-use, portable, transparent

So-called "guarded commands" are introduced as a building block for alternative and repetitive constructs that allow nondeterministic program components for which at least the activity evoked, but possibly even the final state, is not necessarily uniqilely determined by the initial state

interfaces has been tremendously successtil, allowing programmers to leverage off existing building blocks to build interactive systems more easily. We introduce the concept of context widgets that mediate between the environment and the application in the same way graphical widgets mediate between the user

As sensor networks edge closer towards wide-spread deployment, security issues become a central concern. So far, the main research focus has been on making sensor networks feasible and useful, and less emphasis was placed on security. We design a suite of security building blocks that are optimized

the probabilistic and ofttimes incorrect world models generated by learning processes. Execution is fully reactive in the sense that no planning intervenes between perception and action. Dyna relies on machine learning methods for learning from examples--these are among the basic building blocks making up

As we learn from the literature, flexibility in choosing synchronization operations greatly simplifies the task of designing highly concurrent programs. Unfortunately, existing hardware is inflexible and is at best on the level of a Load Linked/Store Conditional operation on a single word. Building