Very interesting, the results are already impressive (hot stand by namenode). I've previously skimmed over the Declarative Networking paper (http://berkeley.intel-research.net/dgay/pubs/06-sigmod-overl...) after seeing an article about in a recent CACM.
Are there any plans to open source any of the work (either the JVM implementation, the C implementation or some of the products, e.g. hot-standby NN)?
Thanks! We basically open-source everything we do; the problem is committing the resources to support stuff and polish it into a usable product, which unfortunately doesn't always happen.
The Java-based implementation can be found here: https://svn.declarativity.com/lincoln/java/trunk/ . The old C++ implementation (P2) is https://svn.declarativity.com/p2/trunk/ .
We haven't been polishing the JOL/BoomFS work, because we're currently working on a brand-new language ("Bloom") that should be much more programmer-friendly; as part of that, I'm writing an efficient C-based dataflow engine. If you have any more questions, feel free to drop me an email.
http://neilconway.org/docs/boom-20091023.pdf http://neilconway.org/docs/netdb2009_paxos.pdf
The basic idea is to write distributed systems in a high-level logic language; essentially, to treat writing a distributed algorithm as a distributed data management problem ("data" being the state of the computation).