Causeway: Operating System Support for Controlling and Analyzing the Execution of Distributed Programs

In this paper we introduce Causeway, operating system support facilitating the development of metaapplications, like priority scheduling and performance debugging, that control and analyze the execution of distributed programs. Meta-applications use Causeway to inject and access metadata on application execution paths to implement their specific goals. Causeway has two components: (1) interfaces to inject and access metadata and (2) mechanisms to automate propagation of metadata. Using Causeway we could rapidly implement a distributed priority scheduling system where priority of a task is injected and propagated as metadata, and accessed to implement global priority scheduling. This required writing only about 150 lines of code on top of Causeway. With this system we demonstrate global priority scheduling on an implementation of the TPC-W benchmark.