Functional Grid Programming with ConCert

Grid computing has become increasingly popular with the growth of the Internet, especially in large-scale scientific computation. Computational Grids are characterized by their scale, their heterogeneity, and their unreliability, making the creation of Grid software quite a challenge. Security concerns make the deployment of Grid infrastructure similarly daunting. We argue that functional programming techniques, both well-known and new, make an excellent practical foundation for Grid computing. We present a prototype Grid framework called ConCert which is able to allow for the trustless dissemination of Grid programs through the use of certified code. The framework is fault-tolerant and relatively easy to implement, owing to a simplified network abstraction. The network abstraction is tedious to program for directly, so we present a high level functional language Grid/ML and a compiler Hemlock for the language.