Towards Distributed Applications…

2008 is the year when we saw the commercial emergence of the many-core / multi -core hardware architecture. As a result of this, field of distributed computing is really buzzing with a lot of activities and cool technologies. Two such projects that attracted my attention are project Volta and DryadLINQ in Microsoft domain and Lively Kernel in the Java world. Let’s focus on Dryad and Volta first.

One common thing about Volta and DryadLINQ is that they focus on making distributed computing easy for the common programmer like me. [DryadLINQ documentation refers to this class of programmers as ordinary programmer – LOL!] . The strategy here is to abstract away the underlying complexity in building the distributed systems and to minimize the disruptive impact of the new technology.


This goal is achieved by focusing on different levels of the .NET implementation stack. This way, as a developer, I can still write my same old C# / VB sequential, LOB code and the technology will transform it into a distributed application.

As with any new technology, there will be few bumps on the road. At the time of writing this post, I found following message on the Volta site –

“Project "Volta" Temporarily Unavailable”

Good news is that big vendors like Microsoft and Sun are taking the bull by the horns. There is no one right answer in solving this complex problem of converting existing sequential , single processor LOB applications into multi-core/ many-core enabled , inherently parallel, distributed applications. We will witness multitude of solutions on hardware and software level. We have seen this gold rush before in the good old days of RDBMS emergence. Let’s hope that same thing will happen with the distributed computing infrastructure.

For more details on Volta and Dryad, check out the following links and publication

1.http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Erik-Meijer-Volta-Wrapping-the-Cloud-with-NET-Part-1

2.Volta: Developing Distributed Applications by Recompiling, IEEE Software Sept/Oct 2008 issue

3.http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/dryad/