aether: Distributed system emulation in Common Lisp

TL;DR

Aether is a Common Lisp package designed for high-level design, simulation, and testing of real-time distributed algorithms and hardware, facilitating experimentation and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Common Lisp framework for emulating distributed systems, enabling detailed design and simulation of real-time algorithms.

Findings

Supports high-level specification and simulation of distributed algorithms.

Provides tools for instrumentation and analysis.

Demonstrates flexibility with small example implementations.

Abstract

We describe a Common Lisp package suitable for the high-level design, specification, simulation, and instrumentation of real-time distributed algorithms and hardware on which to run them. We discuss various design decisions around the package structure, and we explore their consequences with small examples.