Fwd: [Caml-list] library/framework needed for distributed programming in OCaml

[Francois Berenger]

On Wednesday, July 11, 2012 3:40:25 PM UTC+9, Francois Berenger wrote:

Dear list,

Please forgive me to open this possibly re-occurring thread
but I need an up to date version of the answer.

I once wrote a parallel and distributed toy program
in Python which proved to be quite useful (
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/par/
).
It was quite simple and easy to write because I used
a "library that enables you to build applications in which objects can
talk to each other over the network" (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pyro4).

So, I am looking for the gold standard to write
modules in OCaml that can talk to each other over the network
(not objects, I don't like them so much).

Here are some requirements, in a random order:

- the target execution environment is composed of
   about 10 Linux workstations. It may switch to 1 or
   2 interconnected clusters in the future (about 512 cores max).
   So, not as large a scale as a company doing big data.
- the system will be used to transfer files of various sizes
   (big files like a few Gb included, tiny ones also)
- pure OCaml code, so JoCaml and CamlP3l are out.
   I don't like so much if there is some C part in the library
   but this is not a show stopper.
- I really dislike syntax extensions (or things that force
   me to do a lot of sysadmin strange configuration) so user-land only
   would be great
- preserving type-safety and abstraction as mentioned
   in the Quicksilver/OCaml paper would be cool (
   www.kb.ecei.tohoku.ac.jp/~sumii/pub/qs.pdf
   ) but not mandatory.
   Ideally, encryption or compression of communications should
   be a user-toggable feature.
- tolerance to partial failures would be nice but not
   mandatory (because my target environment is not so error prone
   and not so large)
- the project should be actively maintained and preferably used
   in production somewhere ("je n'aime pas essuyer les platres")
- I don't like to use huge frameworks/libraries (j'essaye d'eviter "les
   usines a gaz")

I would be satisfied with even just links to things that
satisfy most of my requirements.

For the moment, the few things that I could find that looks useful are:
  - Client-server part of
    http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/html.bak/book-ora187.html
  - maybe the SunRPC part of
    http://projects.camlcity.org/projects/ocamlnet.html

Thanks a lot for your suggestions,
Francois.

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