A language for specifying the composition of reliable distributed applications

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a scripting language aimed at expressing task (unit of computation) composition and inter-task dependencies of distributed applications whose execution could span arbitrary large durations. This work is motivated by the observation that an increasingly large number of distributed applications are constructed by composing them out of existing applications and are executed in an heterogeneous environment. The resulting applications can be very complex in structure, containing many notification and dataflow dependencies between their constituent applications. The language enables applications to be structured with the properties of modularity, interoperability, dynamic reconfigurability and fault-tolerance.