Writing a Distributed Computing Application in 7 Minutes with Tasklets

Abstract

This demo paper introduces a middleware for distributed computation applications -- the Tasklet system. The Tasklet system allows developers to execute self-contained units of computation -- the so-called Tasklets -- in a pool of heterogeneous computing devices, including desktop computers, cloud resources, mobile devices, and graphical processing units. In this demonstration of the Tasklet system, we visualize the otherwise transparent process of computation offloading, starting from the development of an application until the actual distributed execution of tasks. While existing systems have high setup costs the Tasklet system emphasizes the ease of use and a seamless integration of various heterogeneous devices. In the demonstration, we focus on three key benefits of the Tasklet system. First, we demonstrate the usability of the system by live developing a distributed computing application in less than ten minutes. Second, we show how heterogeneous devices can be set up and join the resource pool during the execution of Tasklets. With a monitoring tool we visualize how the computational workload is split up among these resources. Third, we introduce the concept of quality of computation to tailor the otherwise generic computing framework to the requirements of individual applications.