Bloom distributed programming language released

by gammarator • 15 years ago

69 16 15 years ago

I think I'm a distributed computing fanboy. I'd like to pull a few EC2 (or GPU) instances and see how quick brute forcing different encryption/hashing would take, how big of a prime number one could compute in a few hours, do the same pi/e/eulers, or let some genetic algorithms generate a huge wad of data. No idea why or to what ends, just seems like a cool thing to do with spare time.

jerf2• 15 years ago

You mean in general or with this project? This project appears to be a Ruby DSL with aspirations to be its own language someday, but while it's a Ruby DSL it's not going to be a great language for performance exploration. Ruby is slow. Writing in a faster language(/implementation) and running it on a single computer is like running a Ruby cluster of ~30 machines, for raw performance work.

(Ruby being slow isn't a criticism. "Some of my best friends are slow languages." But it's not where I'd start any sort of clustered/cloud computing project.)

3dFlatLander2• 15 years ago

In general. I've got zero experience doing distributed computing, hence my fanboy label. Just felt like sharing a thought. :) However, any starting points you could provide on being able to accomplish such things would be awesome. I'm especially interested in being able to use cloud services like EC2 for it.

nathanmarz2• 15 years ago

What these guys are doing with Bloom/Bud are searching for dramatically better abstractions for building distributed systems. Getting the performance right should and will come later.

I'm a big believer in the mantra "First make it possible. Then make it beautiful. Then make it fast." In the distributed systems community, there's a lot of experience with "making it possible": Hadoop, Dynamo, etc. Bloom/Bud is attempting to figure out the "make it beautiful" part by leveraging what we already understand about the problem domain of building distributed systems.

Worrying about the kinds of constant-time performance things you mentioned at this stage would be premature optimization. I commend them for building this system in a language that allows them to iterate fast and experiment. I'm sure in the future they'll look at using technology like JRuby to improve the performance of the project.

I think what they're doing is very interesting and potentially groundbreaking -- I can't wait to see where this project goes.

neilc2• 15 years ago

This project appears to be a Ruby DSL with aspirations to be its own language someday

Well, we actually started with our own language a few years ago (a Datalog variant), and have been exploring embeddings into traditional languages as a way to make our ideas more appealing to mainstream programmers.

while it's a Ruby DSL it's not going to be a great language for performance exploration

Absolutely: we've been focusing on pleasant syntax, sensible semantics, tools, and analysis techniques. Performance has definitely not been a goal, but certainly it will be important in the future. Bloom rules can be compiled into a dataflow graph (think: DB query plan, albeit recursive), and executing dataflow graphs efficiently is not difficult -- e.g., we can certainly envision generating query plans from Bloom rule sets and then running those query plans with a C runtime.

BTW, nothing about Bloom is Ruby-specific: we picked Ruby because it let us prototype our ideas quickly. Any language with decent support for collections would be suitable; for example, Scala would be a good candidate for a subsequent version of the language.

pumpmylemma• 15 years ago

See wealth of background material: http://boom.cs.berkeley.edu/papers.html

gwern• 15 years ago

FYI: the name seems to stem from the BOOM project, and have nothing to do with 'Bloom filters'.

joe_hellerstein2• 15 years ago

Leopold Bloom, not Burton Bloom.

CoffeeDregs• 15 years ago

I like it! umm... but what the hell is it? I STFA (skimmed-the-f*ing-article) and don't know what's going on here. Quick! What does this mean?

mx2323• 15 years ago

i feel like this is an interesting step in the right direction

but... what happens if i want to read, process and write a log message....? thats three different bloom blocks that require 2 partial orderings.

instead of totally unordering everything, id rather have the ability to declaratively order functions for a request, where a function is a typical sequenced set of operations.

their examples arent particularly helpful, looks like most of these bloom blocks are single lines...

joe_hellerstein2• 15 years ago

See the sandbox at https://github.com/bloom-lang/bud-sandbox/ Some involved examples there (including a GFS clone).

Bloom distributed programming language released

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