AEON Project

Atomic Events and Ownership Network

Elastic programming model for cloud application

Designing distributed Internet-facing applications that are daptable to unpredictable workloads and efficiently utilize modern cloud computing platforms is hard. The actor model is a popular paradigm that can be used to develop distributed applications: actors encapsulate state and communicate with each other by sending events. Consistency is guaranteed if each event only accesses a single actor, thus eliminating potential data races and deadlocks. However it is nontrivial to provide consistency for concurrent events spanning across multiple actors.

We will introduce a new programming model: AEON, which provides the following properties: (i) Programmability: programmers need only reason about sequential semantics when reasoning about concurrency resulting from multi-actor events; (ii) Scalability: its runtime protocol guarantees serializable and starvation-free execution of multi-actor events, while maximizing parallel execution; (iii) Elasticity: supports fine-grained elasticity enabling the programmer to transparently migrate actors without violating atomicity or entailing significant performance overheads.