The Lilith Framework for the Rapid Development of Secure Scalable Tools for Distributed Computing

Abstract

Lilith is a general purpose framework written in Java, that provides a highly scalable distribution of user code across a heterogeneous computing platform. By creation of suitable user code, the Lilith framework can be used for tool development. Lilith promotes rapid development since it handles all the details of code distribution and communication, while the user code need only define the tool functionality on a single node, in accordance with a simple API. The scalable performance provided by Lilith is crucial to the production of time-effective tools for large distributed systems. This timeefficiency, however, allows both constructive and destructive tasks to be accomplished quickly; therefore, security is a concern. We present the Lilith API and a prototype example of the usage of Lilith in distributed computing and we discuss the security model, which is currently under design.