Afluentes Concurrent I/O Made Easy with Lazy Evaluation

I/O intensive systems can significantly reduce their total execution time by performing these operations concurrently. Despite this enormous potential, most systems perform I/O operations sequentially. One of the reasons behind this is that the most widespread mechanisms for concurrent I/O are callback-based, resulting in code hard to write and maintain. In this context, we propose Afluentes, a Java framework that allows asynchronous functions to be composed just as easily as synchronous ones, facilitating the development of concurrent I/O intensive systems. We performed an experimental evaluation whose results showed that Afluentes leads to significant performance gains over sequential I/O. Compared to callback-based approaches, Afluentes provides similar increases in performance, but with less programming effort.