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Improving the network scalability of Erlang

Chechina, Natalia, Li, Huiqing, Ghaffari, Amir, Thompson, Simon, Trinder, Phil (2016) Improving the network scalability of Erlang. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 90-91 . pp. 22-34. ISSN 0743-7315. (doi:10.1016/j.jpdc.2016.01.002) (KAR id:54099)

Abstract

As the number of cores grows in commodity architectures so does the like- lihood of failures. A distributed actor model potentially facilitates the de- velopment of reliable and scalable software on these architectures. Key com- ponents include lightweight processes which ‘share nothing’ and hence can fail independently. Erlang is not only increasingly widely used, but the un- derlying actor model has been a beacon for programming language design, influencing for example Scala, Clojure and Cloud Haskell.

While the Erlang distributed actor model is inherently scalable, we demon- strate that it is limited by some pragmatic factors. We address two network scalability issues here: globally registered process names must be updated on every node (virtual machine) in the system, and any Erlang nodes that com- municate maintain an active connection. That is, there is a fully connected O(n^2) network of n nodes.

We present the design, implementation, and initial evaluation of a con- servative extension of Erlang – Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang. SD Erlang partitions the global namespace and connection network using s groups. An s group is a set of nodes with its own process namespace and with a fully connected network within the s group, but only individual connections out- side it. As a node may belong to more than one s group it is possible to construct arbitrary connection topologies like trees or rings.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1016/j.jpdc.2016.01.002
Projects: RELEASE
Uncontrolled keywords: Erlang, distributed system, SD Erlang, s_group, scalability
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming,
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Funders: Organisations -1 not found.
Depositing User: S. Thompson
Date Deposited: 10 Feb 2016 13:26 UTC
Last Modified: 11 Dec 2022 03:07 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/54099 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Li, Huiqing.

Creator's ORCID:
CReDIT Contributor Roles:

Thompson, Simon.

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2350-301X
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