AGENDA

Programming Abstraction for Clouds

Shantenu Jha

Abstract: Virtual Machines are the dominant application environments for compute Clouds, however, that does not make application programming any less relevant than \non-virtualized" environments. The limited set of successful scientic Cloud applications show that distributed programming patterns of the type of MapReduce and All-Pairs are required to make Cloud infrastructure a viable compute environment for a large class of problems. The existence of multiple implementations of these programming paradigms also makes clear, that application portability is, even for Clouds, an emerging problem which needs addressing beyond the level of system virtualization. This paper discusses these and other challenges around cloud ap- plications programming and development, and through a discussion of several applications, demonstrates potential solutions. We discuss how using the abstractions { programming interfaces and frameworks that support commonly occurring programming and execution patterns, enables the e cient, extensible and importantly system-independent implementations of common programming patterns such as MapReduce, i.e. same application is usable seamlessly on both traditional Grids and Clouds systems. We further discuss that lessons learned from programming applications for Grid environment also apply, to some extent, to Cloud environments.

Bio: Shantenu Jha is a Senior Research Scientist at CCT at LSU. He is also affiliated with the e-Science Insitute (eSI) Edinburgh. His research interests are at the triple-point of Computational Science, Applied Distributed Systems and Computer Science. At LSU, he is the lead of the SAGA project; at the eSI in Edinburgh he leads the "Distributed Programming Abstractions" research project. He is co-writing a book on "Abstractions for Distributed Applications and Systems".