Impact case study database

Erlang is one of the world’s most widely used programming languages, designed to produce scalable, fault-tolerant, concurrent, distributed, non-stop, soft real-time applications. Around 2009, UofG’s Prof. Trinder analysed the scaling issues associated with Erlang, which made it difficult to obtain good software performance on large multi-core computer architectures, e.g. servers. Prof. Trinder initiated, established and led, as EU project coordinator, an international academic consortium (RELEASE http://www.release-project.eu/) to overcome these issues. The RELEASE project focused on addressing the increasingly critical scaling problems with Erlang, and hence addressed the widening gap between state of the art in hardware and software.

While leading the RELEASE consortium, UofG’s Dr Chechina and Prof. Trinder designed, developed and evaluated better language-level scalability for Erlang, in the form of a new library: Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang. The new technology is employed on servers and in conjunction with the Erlang Open Telecom Platform (OTP).

RELEASE tackled these scalability challenges at three levels:

1. Developing infrastructure to deploy and measure the performance of Erlang on such large-scale architectures

2. Developing and validating the Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang libraries that enable Erlang to be deployed on large scale architectures, i.e. clusters of multicore machines

3. Evolving the Erlang Virtual Machine (VM) so that it can work effectively on large multicore machines.

The unique UofG contributions to the RELEASE consortium led by Trinder were:

• Prof. Trinder’s identification of the fundamental scalability issues with Erlang in 2011, specifically at the Virtual Machine, Language, and Infrastructure levels.

• Prof. Trinder designed solutions and ways of tackling the scalability issues with key industry and academic players including Ericsson, Erlang Solutions and Kent University. This resulted in the foundation for how the new form of Erlang could be developed [3.1, 3.2].

• The vision paper that described the successful EU FP7 research proposal. There were three primary authors Phil Trinder (Glasgow), Simon Thomson (Kent), Ulf Wiger (Erlang Solutions). The paper describes the proposed research. Natalia Chechina, a Glasgow PDRA on the RELEASE project, is the lead author (currently in Bournemouth).

Following the development of SD Erlang, a UofG Knowledge Exchange (GKE) grant was awarded to Trinder (2015–2017) to maintain the cyber presence of SD Erlang and RELEASE, e.g. website, ensuring it contained up to date information and could maximally benefit the programming community [3.3]. This funding also allowed the maintenance and restructuring of the SD Erlang libraries. After discussions with industrial users of SD Erlang, it was noted that in the dynamic world of Erlang/OTP development with yearly major releases and quarterly minor releases, the SD Erlang users preferred up-to-date versions of SD Erlang to use in production, rather than well-tested but outdated versions. Therefore, the UofG team automated the rebasing of SD Erlang for new releases of Erlang/OTP. The primary activities undertaken to achieve this were:

(i) Rebasing SD Erlang manually twice to versions 19.2 and 19.3. The automated rebasement of SD Erlang will be available from the major Erlang/OTP release 20.

(ii) Restructuring SD Erlang, separating some specific SD Erlang functions from global.erl.

Prof. Trinder’s leadership of the RELEASE consortium has led to numerous key achievements including the development of WombatOAM, a proprietary software tool providing a scalable infrastructure for the deployment of Erlang/SD Erlang to thousands of computers.