Message-Passing Concurrency for Scalable, Stateful, Reconfigurable Middleware

Abstract

Message-passing concurrency (MPC) is increasingly being used to build systems software that scales well on multi-core hardware. Functional programming implementations of MPC, such as Erlang, have also leveraged their stateless nature to build middleware that is not just scalable, but also dynamically reconfigurable. However, many middleware platforms lend themselves more naturally to a stateful programming model, supporting session and application state. A limitation of existing programming models and frameworks that support dynamic reconfiguration for stateful middleware, such as component frameworks, is that they are not designed for MPC. In this paper, we present Kompics, a component model and programming framework, that supports the construction and composition of dynamically reconfigurable middleware using stateful, concurrent, message-passing components. An added benefit of our approach is that by decoupling our component execution model, we can run the same code in both simulation and production environments. We present the architectural patterns and abstractions that Kompics facilitates and we evaluate them using a case study of a non-trivial key-value store that we built using Kompics. We show how our model enables the systematic development and testing of scalable, dynamically reconfigurable middleware.<p>QC 20130116</p

A Self-stabilizing Control Plane for the Edge and Fog Ecosystems

“…To experiment with large-scale deployments and ensure both result reproducability and algorithm adoption, we have designed a simulation testbed inspired by Kompics [6], an open-source distributed systems message-passing component model, and extended the entity behavior model to facilitate fault models over a control plane in fog computing ecosystems 2 . The testbed is run in an Openstack private cloud on a server configured with 16VCPU clocked at 2.66GHz, 16GB RAM and 260GB disk.…”

Kompics Scala: narrowing the gap between algorithmic specification and executable code (short paper)

“…In this section we give a short introduction to the Kompics component system [Arad et al 2012;Arad 2013]. The core philosophy of the model is a strict decoupling of a service specification, called a port, and its implementation, called a component, which has no information about its environment including any other components providing services to it or making use of its services.…”

“…It is thus reasonable to attempt to avoid the introduction of such "transcription" errors as best as possible, by allowing the actual code to resemble the formal description closely. This has been one of the goals of the Kompics framework [Kom 2009;Arad et al 2012] at its inception which has therefore been used thoroughly in distributed systems education, in addition to system implementations (e.g., CaracalDB [Car 2013], GVoD [GVo 2014]). However, the initial choice of Java as host language for Kompics' DSL has shown itself to be problematic, primarily in its verbosity, but also particularly due to the mismatch between the pattern matching formalism from the textbooks and the simple type-based match of the implementation as shown in figure 1.…”

Through the wormhole: Low cost, fresh peer sampling for the Internet

“…For simulations, we implemented WPSS on the Kompics platform [17]. Kompics provides a framework for building P2P systems and a discrete event simulator for evaluating those systems under different churn, latency and bandwidth scenarios.…”