Presentation: "Message Passing Concurrency in Erlang. An architectural basis for scalable fault-tolerant systems"

Time: Friday 09:10 - 10:10

Location: Fleming Room

Abstract:

This talk is about the relationship between message passing concurrencyand software architectures for building scalable fault-tolerant systems.

Erlang was explicitly designed for building scalable fault-tolerantsoft real-time distributed systems. These systems are designed for non-stopoperation and have been in operation for over 15 years.

Anybody who designs such a system will soon realise that they need todo things like changing code in the running system without stoppingthe system or they will need to add power to the system by adding afew extra machines without stopping the service that the systemoffers.

Just about all the things you need to build such a reliablescalable system are built into Erlang from the start. These mechanismsin turn rely upon a underlying pure message-passing non-shared memory architectural view of the world. In addition Erlang provides a number of orthogonal error detection and correction mechanisms which provided a base for building fault-tolerant applications.

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Joe Armstrong, Father of Erlang

 Joe  Armstrong

Joe Armstrong is the principle inventor of the Erlang programming Language and coined the term "Concurrency Oriented Programming". He has worked for Ericsson where he developed Erlang and was chief architect of the Erlang/OTP system.

In 1998 he left Ericsson to form Bluetail, a company which developed all its products in Erlang. In 2003 he obtained his PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The title of his thesis was "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors." Today he works for Ericsson.

He is author of the book "Programming Erlang: Software for a concurrent world": (Pragmatic Bookshelf - July 15, 2007).