Programming Research Group Research Report RR-05-07

Scientific Middleware for Abstracted Parallisation

Daniel Goodman and Andrew Martin

Nov 2005, 25pp.

Abstract

This paper describes a distributed web service based middleware platform, written to support the abstracted parallelisation of functions. This abstraction is achieved through the combination of Martlet, a work-flow language that uses constructs from functional programming to abstract the parallelisation in computations away from the user, and the construction of supporting middleware. To build a middleware that supports this requires the middleware to be able to reason about the data structures it holds without restricting their nature. Issues covered in the development of this supporting middleware include being able to handle distributed data transfer and management, function deployment and execution.