Dryad and DryadLINQ

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Welcome! This is the place to get the latest information about the Academic Release of Dryad and DryadLINQ. Visit this site often for news, updates and come at any time to give us your feedback.

Dryad and DryadLINQ

DryadLINQ is a Microsoft Research project, which aims to make distributed computing on clusters of computers simple enough for all programmers. DryadLINQ combines another Microsoft Research technology, Dryad, with the familiar LINQ technology from the Microsoft .NET framework.

Dryad is a high-performance, general-purpose distributed computing engine that handles some of the most difficult aspects of cluster-based distributed computing such as automatic scheduling of processes on the cluster machines, monitoring, fault-tolerance, and support for efficient data-transfer between processes. Dryad provides excellent performance and scalability, and can handle very large-scale data-parallel computations. Microsoft routinely uses Dryad to analyze petabytes of data on cluster of thousands of computers.

DryadLINQ extends the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) programming model to dramatically simplify the task of writing Dryad applications. With DryadLINQ, the code for a program that can run on hundreds of computers to process terabytes of data looks just like the code of a sequential .NET program using LINQ. Behind the scenes however, the DryadLINQ provider transparently converts a LINQ query into a distributed Dryad application and executes it on a cluster.

Try the Academic Release of Dryad and DryadLINQ today

The External Research division of Microsoft Research has teamed up with Dryad/DryadLINQ researchers and with the Windows HPC Server group to make Dryad & DryadLINQ available to the research and academic community. The Academic Release is provided free-of-charge under the following license terms.

The Academic Release includes all the bits necessary to create DryadLINQ programs and run them on clusters equipped with Windows HPC Server 2008 SP1. The release also includes installation manual, programming guides, API reference and complete code samples. Download the Academic Release today and give us your feedback.