Spacetime C++ Core: Higher Performance Implementation of Global Object Tracker Programming Model

Distributed systems are the backbone of a wide range of highly important applications, but developing and debugging such systems become tricky with the synchronization mechanism needing to meet critical consistency and latency requirements. A range of models, frameworks and languages have been developed to tackle such complexity in allowing a shared computing state. In this thesis, based on the Global Object Tracker (GoT) distributed programming model proposed in previous research, I present a re-implementation of the core components of Spacetime, a GoT based Python framework. The C++ implementation tackles multiple limitations the pure Python implementation was faced with, and further improves the performance with redesigned core structures. The internal designs and comparison with previous designs will be discussed throughout this thesis. The C++ core also allows interoperability with other high level languages, such as javascript. Through benchmarks comparing both implementations and the Parse platform with respect to update latency, we are able to show significant performance improvement over the pure Python implementation when the job scales up, and have a competitive performance against Parse in many configurations