Microsoft releases Dryad concurrent-programming code
It’s been two years since Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked up Dryad, Microsoft’s concurrent-programming competitor to Google’s MapReduce and Apache Hadoop. But this week, Dryad was back on the radar screen, with Microsoft’s release of the Dryad code to academics and researchers.
The goal of Dryad is to enable programmers to develop and run applications on Windows computer clusters. The Dryad software is designed to allow systems to automatically parallelize at a low level complex applications across multiple machines. Unlike existing high-performance computing and grid platforms, which are more focused on compute-intensive workloads, Dryad is more geared toward data-intensive computing scenarios where scale and fault-tolerance are of the essence.
Microsoft and a very few select partners have been using the Dryad code to develop a variety of sample and real-world apps — everything from bio-informatics to astronomy-focused programs.
