Blog: Less Clumsy Code for the Cloud

Less Clumsy Code for the Cloud
Technology Review (12/16/09) Naone, Erica

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are working on a project called BOOM, which is developing new programming techniques for cloud computing. BOOM researchers hope to make cloud computing more efficient by using database programming techniques originally developed in the 1980s, which are designed to collect large data sets and process them in various ways. "We can't keep programming computers the way we are," says Berkeley professor Joseph Hellerstein. "People don't have an easy way to write programs that take advantage of the fact that they could rent 100 machines at Amazon." Bloom researchers are adapting an old language called Datalog to develop Bloom, a new language that would provide an easier way for programmers to work with cloud computing resources. The group also is creating a Bloom library that can be used with popular languages such as Java and Python. Oxford University professor Georg Gottlob, a Datalog expert, says the language may have been ahead of its time, but is gaining in popularity with the rise of distributed computing applications.

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