Practical Evaluation of the Lasp Programming Model at Large Scale - An Experience Report

TL;DR

This paper reports on the large-scale evaluation of Lasp, a declarative, functional programming model for distributed applications, demonstrating its scalability up to 1024 nodes in cloud environments.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive evaluation of Lasp's scalability and discusses engineering challenges in deploying research prototypes at large scale.

Findings

Lasp prototype scales to 1024 nodes in Amazon cloud

Combines hybrid gossip with convergent computation for scalability

Addresses engineering challenges of large-scale deployment

Abstract

Programming models for building large-scale distributed applications assist the developer in reasoning about consistency and distribution. However, many of the programming models for weak consistency, which promise the largest scalability gains, have little in the way of evaluation to demonstrate the promised scalability. We present an experience report on the implementation and large-scale evaluation of one of these models, Lasp, originally presented at PPDP `15, which provides a declarative, functional programming style for distributed applications. We demonstrate the scalability of Lasp's prototype runtime implementation up to 1024 nodes in the Amazon cloud computing environment. It achieves high scalability by uniquely combining hybrid gossip with a programming model based on convergent computation. We report on the engineering challenges of this implementation and its evaluation, specifically related to operating research prototypes in a production cloud environment.