Message-Passing Concurrency for Scalable, Stateful, Reconfigurable Middleware

Cosmin Arad (1, 2) , Jim Dowling (1, 2) , Seif Haridi (1, 2)

1 SICS - Swedish Institute of Computer Science [Stockholm]
2 KTH - KTH Royal Institute of Technology [Stockholm]

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.

Mots clés: component model; message-passing; compositional concurrency; dynamic reconfiguration; multi-core execution; reproducible simulation; distributed systems architecture

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Cosmin Arad, Jim Dowling, Seif Haridi. Message-Passing Concurrency for Scalable, Stateful, Reconfigurable Middleware. 13th International Middleware Conference (MIDDLEWARE), Dec 2012, Montreal, QC, Canada. pp.208-228, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-35170-9_11⟩. ⟨hal-01555550⟩