A language for distributed applications

Durra is a language designed to support the development of distributed applications consisting of multiple, concurrent, large-grained tasks executing in a heterogeneous network. An application-level program is written in Durra as a set of task descriptions that prescribes a way to manage the resources of a heterogeneous machine network. The application describes the tasks to be instantiated and executed as concurrent processes, the intermediate queues required to store the messages as they move from producer to consumer processes, and the possible dynamic reconfigurations of the application. The application-level programming paradigm fits a top-down, incremental method of software development very naturally. It is suggested that a language like Durra would be of great value in the development of large, distributed systems.<>