Supporting Malleable Parallel Applications on Clusters of Workstations

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Clusters of workstations are increasingly being used as a platform for parallel computing. Parallel applications executing on workstation clusters must be fault-tolerant in order to survive network and workstation failures, and must have the ability to withdraw from a workstation on detecting owner activity. Malleable parallel applications also have the ability to dynamically shrink or expand their degree of parallelism. Preliminary research indicates that this property leads to significant performance advantages in cluster environments because of the transient nature of the underlying resources. The proposed research involves the design and implementation of an execution environment that supports malleable parallel applications on clusters of workstations. Domain-specific reconfiguration mechanisms that enable changes in the degree of parallelism of a program will be designed and implemented for three important classes of parallel applications, specifically loosely synchronous structured grid-oriented applications, loosely synchronous unstructured grid-oriented applications, and a class of asynchronous irregular applications from the domain of operations research. These mechanisms will be integrated into specialized run-time libraries that support these applications. Finally, algorithms and techniques for minimizing the overhead of dynamic reconfiguration will be developed.