Afluentes Concurrent I/O Made Easy with Lazy Evaluation

• Published in: 2014 22nd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing pp. 279 - 287
• Main Authors: Medeiros de Araujo, Saulo, Da Gama, Kiev Santos, Souto Rosa, Nelson, Lemos Meira, Silvio
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-02-2014
• Subjects: asynchronous; callback; concurrency; Context; Contracts; Data transfer; function composition; I/O; Java; lazy evaluation; Libraries; Programming; Runtime
• DOI: 10.1109/PDP.2014.75
• EISSN: 2377-5750
• ISSN: 1066-6192

I/O intensive systems can significantly reduce their total execution time by performing these operations concurrently. Despite this enormous potential, most systems perform I/O operations sequentially. One of the reasons behind this is that the most widespread mechanisms for concurrent I/O are callback-based, resulting in code hard to write and maintain. In this context, we propose Afluentes, a Java framework that allows asynchronous functions to be composed just as easily as synchronous ones, facilitating the development of concurrent I/O intensive systems. We performed an experimental evaluation whose results showed that Afluentes leads to significant performance gains over sequential I/O. Compared to callback-based approaches, Afluentes provides similar increases in performance, but with less programming effort.