Skip to main content
Log in

Heterogeneous Message Passing and a Link to Resource Management

  • Published:
The Journal of Supercomputing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Parallel process communication and system resource management have been seen as two separate entities in parallel and distributed systems. This causes difficulties in the dynamic mapping of newly spawned processes, because the application has little or no information on the availability, the connectivity and the current work-load of the target system. As a consequence, process mappings are often sub-optimal, overloading resources on one system while other processors are idling. We present a software system named "PLUS" that provides • interprocess communication between different message passing models such as MPI, PVM and PARIX, and • access to resource management systems for optimal process mapping and task migration.

PLUS is a light-weight, extensible and efficient communication interface. With only four commands, PLUS is almost transparent ot the application code. Our current implementation supports inter-process communication between PVM, MPI and PARIX, but it can be easily extended to other vendor-specific message passing libraries. As PLUS has been designed for wide area networks, much effort has been spent on portability and on optimizing the communication speed across internet and also intranet links.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. C. Albing. Cray NQS: production batch for a distributed computing world. Proceedings of the 11th Sun User Group Conference and Exhibition, pp. 302–309, Brookline, December 1993.

  2. A. Reinefeld, R. Baraglia, T. Decker, J. Gehring, D. Laforenza, J. Simon, F. Ramme, and T. Römke. The MOL Project: An Open, Extensible Metacomputer. Proceedings of Heterogeneous Computing Workshop at IPPS'97, pp. 17–31, Geneva, March 1997.

  3. M. Baker, G. Fox, H. Yua. Cluster Computing Review. Northeast Parallel Architecture Center, Syracuse University, New York, November 1995.

  4. A. Reinefeld, J. Gehring, and M. Brune. Communicating Across Parallel Message-Passing Environments. Journal of Systems Architecture, Special Issue on Cluster Computing, 1997.

  5. T. DeFanti, I. Foster, M. Papka, R. Stevens, and T. Kuhfuss. Overview of the I-Way: Wide area visual supercomputing. International Journal of Supercomputer Applications, 10, 1996.

  6. I. Foster, J. Geisler, C. Kesselman, and S. Tuecke. Managing multiple communication methods in highperformance networked computing systems. Parallel and Distributed Computing, 1996.

  7. A. Geist, A. Beguelin, J. Dongarra, W. Liang, B. Manchek, and V. Sunderam. PVM: Parallel Virtual machine --A User's Guide and Tutorial for Network Parallel Computing, MIT Press, 1994.

  8. GENIAS Software GmbH. Codine: Computing in distributed networked environments. http://www.genias.de/genias/english/codine.html, 1995.

  9. W. Gropp and E. Lusk. MPICH working note: Creating a new MPICH device using the channel interface. Technical report, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, 1995.

  10. R. Hempel. The ANL/GMD macros (PARMACS) in Fortran for portable parallel programming using the message passing programming model--User's Guide and Reference Manual. Technical Report, GMD, 1991.

  11. Message Passing Interface Forum, MPI: A message–passing interface standard. International Journal of Supercomputer Applications, 8, 1994.

  12. H. Mierendorff, K. Stueben, C.-A. Thole, and O. Thomas. Europort-1: Porting industrial codes to parallel architectures. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 919, 1995.

  13. J. Pruyne and M. Livny. Parallel processing on dynamic resources with CARMI. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1995.

  14. F. Ramme, T. Römke, and K. Kremer. A distributed computing center software for efficient use of parallel computer systems. High-Performance Computing and Networking, Vol. 2 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 129–136, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  15. W. R. Stevens, UNIX Network Programming, Prentice Hall, 1990.

  16. R. van Renesse, K. Birman, R. Friedmann, M. Hayden, and D. Karr. A framework for protocol composition in horus. Proceedings Principles of Distributed Computing Conf, 1995. 17.

  17. L. Smarr and C.E. Catlett. Metacomputing. Communications of the ACM, 6:45–52, 1992. R. Butler and E. Lusk, User's Guide to the p4 Parallel Programming System. Technical Report ANL-92/17, Argonne National Laboratory, October1992.

    Google Scholar 

  18. F. Ramme and T. Römke. Resource Description Language -- Language Definition. Technical Report TR-002-92, Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, 1992.

  19. B. Bauer and F. Ramme.A general Purpose Resource Description Language. Reihe Informatik aktuell,Hrsg: R. Grebe, M. Baumann. Parallele Datenverarbeitung mit dem Computer, pp. 68-75, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  20. J. Gehring. Dynamic Program Description as a Basis for Runtime Optimization. Euro-Par'97, Workshop on Scheduling and Load Balancing, Passau, Germany, September 1997.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Brune, M., Gehring, J. & Reinefeld, A. Heterogeneous Message Passing and a Link to Resource Management. The Journal of Supercomputing 11, 355–369 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007966723231

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007966723231

Navigation