Oolong: asynchronous distributed applications made easy.

We present Oolong, a distributed programming framework designed for sparse asynchronous applications such as distributed web crawling, shortest paths, and connected components. Oolong stores program state in distributed in-memory key-value tables on which user-defined triggers may be set. Triggers can be activated whenever a key-value pair is modified. The event-driven nature of triggers is particularly appropriate for asynchronous computation where workers can independently process part of the state towards convergence without any need for global synchronization. Using Oolong, we have implemented solutions for several large-scale asynchronous computation problems, achieving good performance and robust fault tolerance.