Anil Madhavapeddy, University of Cambridge - Mirage: Fat-Free Programming

Anil Madhavapeddy, University of Cambridge

Talk: Mirage: Fat-Free Programming

Abstract:

Applications run on all kinds of environments these days---multicore desktops, virtual cloud infrastructures, smart-phones, and web browsers.

 Programming across these requires learning different languages, ways of persisting data and communicating over the network.  The end results are bloated due to bundling redundant code (e.g. a cloud distribution can run into hundreds of megabytes).  Even worse, code written for a high-level framework such as Google AppEngine is locked in to that particular API and cannot be easily moved.

Our Mirage project compiles network applications into highly specialised binaries across a variety of targets. Starting from a single succinct OCaml code base, we use automatic type-driven code generation to transform I/O and concurrency in the source code at compilation time.

Our prototype compiler outputs small native binaries for Android mobile phones (SQL/ARM native code), servlets for Google AppEngine (BigTable/Java class files), and high-speed custom kernels for cloud deployment (Xen block devices/LWIP).

In this talk, I will walk through an application built using these "multi-scale" techniques, discuss the benefits of greatly improved reliability by deploying across multiple cloud technologies, and madder ideas such as "dust clouds" of millions of VMs to facilitate anonymous communications.

Bio:

Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy is a Senior Research Fellow at Wolfson College Cambridge based in the Systems Research Group, focused on programming models for cloud computing. Dr. Madhavapeddy was on the original team at Cambridge that developed the Xen hypervisor, and subsequently served as the senior architect and product director for XenSource/Citrix before returning to academia in 2009.

Prior to obtaining his PhD in 2006 from the University of Cambridge, Dr. Madhavapeddy had a diverse background in industry at Network Appliance,  NASA, and Internet Vision.  In addition to professional and academic activities, Dr. Madhavapeddy is an active member of the open source development community with the OpenBSD operating system and various networking, database and web applications, a member of the steering committee for Commercial Uses of Functional Programming, and on the boards of startup companies such as Limbe Labs and Ashima Arts.