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Unibus: a contrarian approach to grid computing

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Abstract

Despite maturing in many ways, heterogeneous distributed computing platforms continue to require substantial effort in terms of software installation and management for efficient use, often necessitating manual intervention by resource providers and end-users. In this paper we propose a novel model of resource sharing that is a viable alternative to that commonly adopted in the grid community. Our model, termed Unibus, shifts the resource virtualization and aggregation responsibilities to the software at the client side, taking these burdens away from resource providers. Drawing from parallels with operating systems, we argue that distributed resources may be unified and aggregated at the user’s end, in a manner similar to ordinary peripheral devices. Running on the user’s access device, the overlay system software can virtualize remote resources via dynamically deployed software mediators analogous to device drivers, reconfiguring the resources if necessary via “firmware” modules. To illustrate the feasibility of the Unibus model, we have prototyped a development toolkit automating the installation, build, run, and post-processing stages of MPI applications. Through the provided console, this toolkit can deploy and configure an MPI execution environment across a set of heterogeneous, isolated distributed resources, turning them into a coherent virtual machine with a single interface point. We conducted a series of experiments with the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. Results indicate that the toolkit preserves the application performance of “bare” MPI, while substantially reducing maintenance and configuration efforts. Overall, the results suggest that the envisioned client side overlay model for resource sharing may potentially be able to address some of long-standing obstacles in building heterogeneous HPC systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Math and Computer Science, Emory University, 400 Dowman Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA

    Dawid Kurzyniec, Magdalena Sławińska, Jarosław Sławiński & Vaidy Sunderam

Authors
  1. Dawid Kurzyniec
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  2. Magdalena Sławińska
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  3. Jarosław Sławiński
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  4. Vaidy Sunderam
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dawid Kurzyniec.

Additional information

Research supported in part by U.S. DoE grant DE-FG02-02ER25537 and NSF grant ACI-0220183. An earlier version of the material in Section 5 of this paper was submitted to PDP 2007.

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Kurzyniec, D., Sławińska, M., Sławiński, J. et al. Unibus: a contrarian approach to grid computing. J Supercomput 42, 125–144 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-006-0033-0

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