DtCraft: A Distributed Execution Engine for Compute-intensive Applications

Recent years have seen rapid growth in data-driven distributed systems such as Hadoop MapReduce, Spark, and Dryad. However, the counterparts for high-performance or compute-intensive applications including large-scale optimizations, modeling, and simulations are still nascent. In this paper, we introduce DtCraft, a modern C++17-based distributed execution engine that efficiently supports a new powerful programming model for building high-performance parallel applications. Users need no understanding of distributed computing and can focus on high-level developments, leaving difficult details such as concurrency controls, workload distribution, and fault tolerance handled by our system transparently. We have evaluated DtCraft on both micro-benchmarks and large-scale optimization problems, and shown promising performance on computer clusters. In a particular semicondictor design problem, we achieved 30x speedup with 40 nodes and 15x less development efforts over hand-crafted implementation.