Experiments in Building Distributed Applications Through Compositional Programming

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Past failures in building large-scale distributed applications in areas such as avionics and telephony are painful reminders of the difficulty of developing and debugging distributed programs. As applications become more ambitious in both scale and functionality, these problems will only be compounded. The Seuss project is based on the premise that this complexity can be managed by adopting a simpler model of computation. The Seuss programming model builds distributed applications from large sequential components which interact through small but complex interfaces. This project has the following goals: (1) to develop conceptual tools for reducing the complexity of these interfaces, (2) to reuse sequential pieces of code written in standard languages, (3) to achieve efficiency by executing the various components concurrently. More specifically, the Seuss model of concurrent object oriented programming reduces the complexity of concurrency by allowing programmers to reason about distributed applications as if they were sequential programs. At the same time, Seuss allows programs to be executed with multiple threads of control. Finally, Seuss provides a logic for proving the equivalence of sequential Seuss programs and their multi-threaded executions. This project will allow programmers to build qualitatively more complex distributed applications with the assurance that they are both efficient and correct.