Piccolo: Building Fast, Distributed Programs with Partitioned Tables

Piccolo is a new data-centric programming model for writing parallel in-memory applications in data centers. Unlike existing data-flow models, Piccolo allows computation running on different machines to share distributed mutable state via a key-value table interface. Piccolo enables efficient application implementations. In particular, applications can specify locality policies to exploit the locality of shared state access and Piccolo's run-time automatically resolves write-write conflicts using user-defined accumulation functions. Using Piccolo, the authors have implemented applications for several problem domains, including the PageRank algorithm, k-means clustering and a distributed crawler.