Multimethod communication for high-performance metacomputing applications

  • Authors:

  • Ian Foster;Jonathan Geisler;Carl Kesselman;Steven Tuecke

  • Affiliations:

  • Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL;Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL;Beckman Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA;Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL

  • Venue:
  • Supercomputing '96 Proceedings of the 1996 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

Metacomputing systems use high-speed networks to connect supercomputers, mass storage systems, scientific instruments, and display devices with the objective of enabling parallel applications to utilize geographically distributed computing resources. However, experience shows that high performance can often be achieved only if applications can integrate diverse communication substrates, transport mechanisms, and protocols, chosen according to where communication is directed, what is communicated, or when communication is performed. In this paper, we describe a software architecture that addresses this requirement. This architecture allows multiple communication methods to be supported transparently in a single application, with either automatic or user-specified selection criteria guiding the methods used for each communication. We describe an implementation of this architecture, based on the Nexus communication library, and use this implementation to evaluate performance issues. This implementation was used to support a wide variety of applications in the I-WAY metacomputing experiment at Supercomputing~95; we use one of these applications to provide a quantitative demonstration of the advantages of multimethod communication in a heterogeneous networked environment.