Reyes-Anastacio, Hugo G.Gonzalez-Compean, J. L.Sosa Sosa, Victor JesusCarretero Pérez, JesúsGarcía Blas, Francisco Javier2021-09-272022-10-012020-10Reyes-Anastacio, H. G., Gonzalez-Compean, J., Sosa-Sosa, V. J., Carretero, J. & Garcia-Blas, J. (2020). Kulla, a container-centric construction model for building infrastructure-agnostic distributed and parallel applications. Journal of Systems and Software, 168, 110665.0164-1212https://hdl.handle.net/10016/33325This paper presents the design, development, and implementation of Kulla, a virtual container-centric construction model that mixes loosely coupled structures with a parallel programming model for building infrastructure-agnostic distributed and parallel applications. In Kulla, applications, dependencies and environment settings, are mapped with construction units called Kulla-Blocks. A parallel programming model enables developers to couple those interoperable structures for creating constructive structures named Kulla-Bricks. In these structures, continuous dataflow and parallel patterns can be created without modifying the code of applications. Methods such as Divide&Containerize (data parallelism), Pipe&Blocks (streaming), and Manager/Block (task parallelism) were developed to create Kulla-Bricks. Recursive combinations of Kulla instances can be grouped in deployment structures called Kulla-Boxes, which are encapsulated into VCs to create infrastructure-agnostic parallel and/or distributed applications. Deployment strategies were created for Kulla-Boxes to improve the IT resource profitability. To show the feasibility and flexibility of this model, solutions combining real-world applications were implemented by using Kulla instances to compose parallel and/or distributed system deployed on different IT infrastructures. An experimental evaluation based on use cases solving satellite and medical image processing problems revealed the efficiency of Kulla model in comparison with some traditional state-of-the-art solutions.17eng© 2020 Published by Elsevier Inc.Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 EspañaInfrastructure-agnostic applicationsConstruction modelVirtual containersParallel patternsPipelinesresearch articleInformáticahttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2020.110665open access117Journal of Systems and Software168AR/0000027101