1,132 research outputs found
RELEASE: A High-level Paradigm for Reliable Large-scale Server Software
Erlang is a functional language with a much-emulated model for building reliable distributed systems. This paper outlines the RELEASE project, and describes the progress in the rst six months. The project aim is to scale the Erlang's radical concurrency-oriented programming paradigm to build reliable general-purpose software, such as server-based systems, on massively parallel machines. Currently Erlang has inherently scalable computation and reliability models, but in practice scalability is constrained by aspects of the language and virtual machine. We are working at three levels to address these challenges: evolving the Erlang virtual machine so that it can work effectively on large scale multicore systems; evolving the language to Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang; developing a scalable Erlang infrastructure to integrate multiple, heterogeneous clusters. We are also developing state of the art tools that allow programmers to understand the behaviour of massively parallel SD Erlang programs. We will demonstrate the e ectiveness of the RELEASE approach using demonstrators and two large case studies on a Blue Gene
RELEASE: A High-level Paradigm for Reliable Large-scale Server Software
Erlang is a functional language with a much-emulated model for building reliable distributed systems. This paper outlines the RELEASE project, and describes the progress in the first six months. The project aim is to scale the Erlangās radical concurrency-oriented programming paradigm to build reliable general-purpose software, such as server-based systems, on massively parallel machines. Currently Erlang has inherently scalable computation and reliability models, but in practice scalability is constrained by aspects of the language and virtual machine. We are working at three levels to address these challenges: evolving the Erlang virtual machine so that it can work effectively on large scale multicore systems; evolving the language to Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang; developing a scalable Erlang infrastructure to integrate multiple, heterogeneous clusters. We are also developing state of the art tools that allow programmers to understand the behaviour of massively parallel SD Erlang programs. We will demonstrate the effectiveness of the RELEASE approach using demonstrators and two large case studies on a Blue Gene
Multi-level Visualization of Concurrent and Distributed Computation in Erlang
This paper describes a prototype visualization system
for concurrent and distributed applications programmed
using Erlang, providing two levels of granularity of view. Both
visualizations are animated to show the dynamics of aspects of
the computation.
At the low level, we show the concurrent behaviour of the
Erlang schedulers on a single instance of the Erlang virtual
machine, which we call an Erlang node. Typically there will be
one scheduler per core on a multicore system. Each scheduler
maintains a run queue of processes to execute, and we visualize
the migration of Erlang concurrent processes from one run queue
to another as work is redistributed to fully exploit the hardware.
The schedulers are shown as a graph with a circular layout. Next
to each scheduler we draw a variable length bar indicating the
current size of the run queue for the scheduler.
At the high level, we visualize the distributed aspects of the
system, showing interactions between Erlang nodes as a dynamic
graph drawn with a force model. Speci?cally we show message
passing between nodes as edges and lay out nodes according to
their current connections. In addition, we also show the grouping
of nodes into ās_groupsā using an Euler diagram drawn with
circles
Improving Runtime Overheads for detectEr
We design monitor optimisations for detectEr, a runtime-verification tool
synthesising systems of concurrent monitors from correctness properties for
Erlang programs. We implement these optimisations as part of the existing tool
and show that they yield considerably lower runtime overheads when compared to
the unoptimised monitor synthesis.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2015, arXiv:1503.0437
Simplifying Contract-Violating Traces
Contract conformance is hard to determine statically, prior to the deployment
of large pieces of software. A scalable alternative is to monitor for contract
violations post-deployment: once a violation is detected, the trace
characterising the offending execution is analysed to pinpoint the source of
the offence. A major drawback with this technique is that, often, contract
violations take time to surface, resulting in long traces that are hard to
analyse. This paper proposes a methodology together with an accompanying tool
for simplifying traces and assisting contract-violation debugging.Comment: In Proceedings FLACOS 2012, arXiv:1209.169
Property-Based Testing - The ProTest Project
The ProTest project is an FP7 STREP on property based testing. The purpose of the project is to develop software engineering approaches to improve reliability of service-oriented networks; support fault-finding and diagnosis based on specified properties of the system. And to do so we will build automated tools that will generate and run tests, monitor execution at run-time, and log events for analysis.
The Erlang / Open Telecom Platform has been chosen as our initial implementation vehicle due to its robustness and reliability within the telecoms sector. It is noted for its success in the ATM telecoms switches by Ericsson, one of the project partners, as well as for multiple other uses such as in facebook, yahoo etc. In this paper we provide an overview of the project goals, as well as detailing initial progress in developing property based testing techniques and tools for the concurrent functional programming language Erlang
On Synchronous and Asynchronous Monitor Instrumentation for Actor-based systems
We study the impact of synchronous and asynchronous monitoring
instrumentation on runtime overheads in the context of a runtime verification
framework for actor-based systems. We show that, in such a context,
asynchronous monitoring incurs substantially lower overhead costs. We also show
how, for certain properties that require synchronous monitoring, a hybrid
approach can be used that ensures timely violation detections for the important
events while, at the same time, incurring lower overhead costs that are closer
to those of an asynchronous instrumentation.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2014, arXiv:1502.0315
Erlang Code Evolution Control
During the software lifecycle, a program can evolve several times for
different reasons such as the optimisation of a bottle-neck, the refactoring of
an obscure function, etc. These code changes often involve several functions or
modules, so it can be difficult to know whether the correct behaviour of the
previous releases has been preserved in the new release. Most developers rely
on a previously defined test suite to check this behaviour preservation. We
propose here an alternative approach to automatically obtain a test suite that
specifically focusses on comparing the old and new versions of the code. Our
test case generation is directed by a sophisticated combination of several
already existing tools such as TypEr, CutEr, and PropEr; and other ideas such
as allowing the programmer to chose an expression of interest that must
preserve the behaviour, or the recording of the sequences of values to which
this expression is evaluated. All the presented work has been implemented in an
open-source tool that is publicly available on GitHub.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium
on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur,
Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854
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