Currently, the development of overlay network systems typically produces two software artifacts: a simulator to model key protocols and a production system for a WAN environment. However, this methodology requires the maintenance of two implementations, as well as adding both development overhead and the potential for errors, through divergence in the different code bases. This paper describes how our message-passing component model, called Kompics, is used to build overlay network systems using a P2P component framework, where the same implementation can be simulated or deployed in a production environment. Kompics enables two different modes of simulation: deterministic simulation for reproducible debugging, and emulation mode for stress-testing systems. We used our P2P component framework to build and evaluate overlay systems, and we show how our model lowers the programming barrier for simulating and deploying overlay network systems.

Message-passing concurrency (MPC) is increasingly being used to build systems software that scales well on multi-core hardware. Functional programming implementations of MPC, such as Erlang, have also leveraged their stateless nature to build middleware that is not just scalable, but also dynamically reconfigurable. However, many middleware platforms lend themselves more naturally to a stateful programming model, supporting session and application state. A limitation of existing programming models and frameworks that support dynamic reconfiguration for stateful middleware, such as component frameworks, is that they are not designed for MPC. In this paper, we present Kompics, a component model and programming framework, that supports the construction and composition of dynamically reconfigurable middleware using stateful, concurrent, message-passing components. An added benefit of our approach is that by decoupling our component execution model, we can run the same code in both simulation and production environments. We present the architectural patterns and abstractions that Kompics facilitates and we evaluate them using a case study of a non-trivial key-value store that we built using Kompics. We show how our model enables the systematic development and testing of scalable, dynamically reconfigurable middleware.

QC 20130116

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