Distributed functional programming in Scheme
Alex Schwendner · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2010
Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science In this thesis, we present a framework for writing distributed computer programs in Scheme using simple future semantics. This allows a Scheme program originally written for execution on a single computer to be run in a distributed manner on a cluster of computers with very little modi cation to the program. The structure of the computation can be extremely general and need not be speci ed in advance. In order to provide this programming environment, we implemented a system of job execution servers which transparently execute arbitrary Scheme code written in a functional or mostly functional style. The use of a functional, side e ect free style of programming simpli es the challenges of data consistency. A number of demonstrations of the system are presented, including a distributed SAT solver. The performance of the system is shown to increase roughly linearly with the number of servers employed.