“Dryad” by Microsoft Research

Dryad is a Microsoft Research project – they refer to it as its own “infrastructure” actually – that allows programmers to target hugely-clustered platforms without having to change anything about the way in which they author their software.  In their introductory article explaining the project, they cite advantages such as executing code on thousands of machines across and enterprise or even entire datacenter. 

Here’s their summary of the project’s objectives:

Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs. A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming.

I would imagine the supercomputers downstairs are probably off limits to us on the Apps team.  But even in much smaller (by comparison) environments, a cluster of n number of computers could be leveraged to run code across a clustered environment, and that clustering and parallelism would be transparent to us as developers. 

In the article, I found it particularly interesting that they mention Dryad being used with familiar technologies such as SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services), and LINQ. 

You can check out the full article here:

http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/Dryad/