Microsoft Research recently announced the availability, under Academic Licensing, of Dryad, an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs. A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming.
DryadLINQ is the managed high level programming abstraction used to compose Dryad vertex topology graphs that the Dryad infrastructure uses to partition parallel computations. Here, Erik Meijer and Dryad team member Roger Barga discuss Drayad and DryadLINQ at a high level so that most of us can understand the implications, history and future of Dryad. Here is an introductory video, where Erik Meijer and Roger Barga dive deep into Dryad with one of the scientists behind it.
