CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Pursuing High Performance on Clouds and Other Dynamically Heterogeneous Computing Platforms

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Emerging technologies have led to revolutionary computing platformssuch as computing clouds and many genres of computing grids. Theseplatforms promise to make high-performance computing platformsaccessible to the public. Realizing this promise, though, requiresone to cope with the platforms' dynamic heterogeneity, i.e., the factthat their constituent computers' relative powers and speeds canchange at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways; for instance,shared computers may slow down or speed up significantly because ofunpredictable changes in workloads. The research of the PIs isdeveloping a transformative computing paradigm that will enablehigh-performance computing on these platforms. The new paradigmreplaces traditional schedulers' attempts to accommodate theparticulars of a computing platform---a goal that dynamicheterogeneity confutes---by orchestrating a complex computation in away that honors the relevant details of the computation's inherentstructure. In this way, the paradigm increases opportunities forexecuting independent tasks in parallel (i.e., simultaneously),thereby completing computations faster. Preliminary assessments---viasimulated competitions with common computation schedulers---suggestthat the new paradigm often completes computations faster thancompeting strategies by double-digit percentages. The challenge is torealize the paradigm in a computationally efficient manner, and thePIs are pursuing a variety of avenues toward achieving suchefficiency. Because of the complexity of dynamically heterogeneousplatforms, this goal requires advances in the technology of bothscheduling algorithms and simulation software. The PIs are uniquelyqualified to produce such advances because of their complementaryexpertise in algorithms, applications, and systems.