🕸️ DisSysLab — Build distributed apps by connecting functions

DisSysLab (aka dsl) is a Python framework that helps you build distributed programs. A program is represented by a directed graph in which each node is a Python function. The Python functions at nodes do not use parallel programming primitives such as threads or send/receive messages. You can build distributed programs using dsl if you are familiar with elementary programming.

dsl is designed to introduce first-year undergraduates to distributed programs. A goal is to help each student build distributed system applications that specifically interest her, and to do so easily. This is done by using dsl to connect functions in widely-used libraries such as Scikit and Gemini. dsl is an early release; it will evolve, and feedback is welcome.

Edges in the graph carry messages from function to function. The functions at the nodes run concurrently. We call a node of the graph an agent. You specify a graph by its list of edges. Here is an example of a graph gwith three agents -- data_source, data_transformer, and data_sink and two edges: (1) an edge from data_source to data_transformer and (2) an edge from data_transformer to data_sink.

from dsl import network

g = network([(data_source, data_transformer), (data_transformer, data_sink)])

You can specify the agents that generate data, such as data_source in the example, as Python functions or use dsl wrappers to sensors, RSS feeds, or other sources of data. Likewise a data_sink can be a Python function, or a wrapper that controls an actuator or stores a stream of data in a database. Similarly, can write your own function for the data_transformer node or choose a function from Python's rich libraries.

You can create arbitrary graphs. The initial modules of this description use acyclic graphs. Later modules deal with graphs that contain cycles.

TL;DR – try it

git clone https://github.com/kmchandy/DisSysLab.git
cd DisSysLab
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate   # Windows: .\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
python -m pip install -e .
python -m modules.ch01_networks.simple_network

👉 Start Here

Module 1. An introduction to dsl.

Modules

1. Module 1 — Intro → modules/ch01_networks/README_1.md
2. Module 2 — Sources → modules/ch02_sources/README_1.md
3. Module 3 — OpenAI agents → modules/ch03_GPT/README_1.md
4. Module 4 — Numerics → modules/ch04_numeric/README.md