Scripting the Cloud with Skywriting

Recent distributed computing frameworks—such as MapReduce, Hadoop and Dryad—have made it simple to exploit multiple machines in a compute cloud. However, these frameworks use coordination languages that are insufficiently expressive for many classes of computation, including iterative and recursive algorithms. To address this problem, and generalise previous approaches, we introduce Skywriting: a Turing-powerful, purely-functional script language for describing distributed computations. In this paper, we introduce the main features of Skywriting, and outline our novel cooperative task farming execution engine.