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Kamelia: highly concurrent and network systems tamed
White Paper, (января 2005)
Аннотация
Kamaelia is a project aimed at building large scale online media delivery systems for the long term. Large scale media systems are naturally concurrent systems since they assume large numbers of people watching programmes simultaneously. In the long term the systems people will be using to access and serve BBC services online will also be naturally concurrent. A key aim of Kamaelia is to enable even novice programmers to create scalable and safe concurrent systems, quickly and easily. Kamaelia provides a tool set for dealing with large scale concurrency in a manner very similar to Unix pipelines, and is based on taking a hardware approach to software construction. This leads naturally to ease of system composition. The tool set includes a wide variety of pre-built components for creating network servers and clients along with components for handling media, interactive systems and text processing. Kamaelia's architecture operates efficiently on existing single CPU architectures. It also encourages the construction of components that will also take advantage of the naturally parallel mainstream systems being developed by all major hardware vendors. Kamaelia enables the majority of developers to create safer, more stable high performance systems, rather than a select few. Kamaelia encourages fine grained parallelism without the need for complex state-machine based designs or the overheads of large numbers of parallel threads of execution. This tool set furthers the core goal in Kamaelia - allowing the BBC to experiment with systems for long term, large scale, online media delivery. By designing Kamaelia to lower the barrier to contribution we allow the community to join with us in building these systems.
