Title
Boom analytics: exploring data-centric, declarative programming for the cloud
Abstract
Building and debugging distributed software remains extremely difficult. We conjecture that by adopting a data-centric approach to system design and by employing declarative programming languages, a broad range of distributed software can be recast naturally in a data-parallel programming model. Our hope is that this model can significantly raise the level of abstraction for programmers, improving code simplicity, speed of development, ease of software evolution, and program correctness. This paper presents our experience with an initial large-scale experiment in this direction. First, we used the Overlog language to implement a "Big Data" analytics stack that is API-compatible with Hadoop and HDFS and provides comparable performance. Second, we extended the system with complex distributed features not yet available in Hadoop, including high availability, scalability, and unique monitoring and debugging facilities. We present both quantitative and anecdotal results from our experience, providing some concrete evidence that both data-centric design and declarative languages can substantially simplify distributed systems programming.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1755913.1755937
EuroSys
Keywords
Field
DocType
boom analytics,data-centric approach,systems programming,big data,debugging facility,declarative language,data-centric design,declarative programming language,data-parallel programming model,system design,software evolution,distributed system,datalog,cloud computing,declarative programming,programming language,high availability
Procedural programming,Fifth-generation programming language,System programming,Programming language,Programming paradigm,Computer science,Inductive programming,Real-time computing,Declarative programming,Software development,Computer programming
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
74
3.28
30
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Peter Alvaro146328.96
Tyson Condie2116264.84
Neil Conway345821.46
Khaled Elmeleegy490547.10
Joseph M. Hellerstein5140931651.14
Russell Sears6179985.12