Placement inference for a client-server calculus

Abstract

Placement inference assigns locations to operations in a distributed program under the constraints that some operations can only execute on particular locations and that values may not be transferred arbitrarily between locations. An optimal choice of locations additionally minimizes the run time of the program, given that operations take different time on different locations and that a cost is associated to transferring a value from one location to another. We define a language with a time- and location-aware semantics, formalize placement inference in terms of constraints, and show that solving these constraints is an NP-complete problem. We then show that optimal placements are computable via a reformulation of the semantics in terms of matrices and an application of the max-plus spectral theory. A prototype implementation validates our results. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.