The design and evaluation of a virtual distributed computing environment

  • Authors:

  • Haluk Topcuoglu;Salim Hariri;Dongmin Kim;Yoonhee Kim;Xue Bing;Baoqing Ye;Ilkyeun Ra;Jon Valente

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, HPDC Laboratory, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100, USA;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, HPDC Laboratory, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100, USA;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, HPDC Laboratory, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100, USA;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, HPDC Laboratory, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100, USA;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, HPDC Laboratory, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100, USA;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, HPDC Laboratory, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100, USA;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, HPDC Laboratory, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100, USA;Rome Laboratory, Rome, NY 13441, USA

  • Venue:
  • Cluster Computing
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Current advances in high-speed networks such as ATM and fiber-optics, and software technologies such as the JAVA programming language and WWW tools, have made network-based computing a cost-effective, high-performance distributed computing environment. Metacomputing, a special subset of network-based computing, is a well-integrated execution environment derived by combining diverse and distributed resources such as MPPs, workstations, mass storage, and databases that show a heterogeneous nature in terms of hardware, software, and organization. In this paper we present the Virtual Distributed Computing Environment (VDCE), a metacomputing environment currently being developed at Syracuse University. VDCE provides an efficient web-based approach for developing, evaluating, and visualizing large-scale distributed applications that are based on predefined task libraries on diverse platforms. The VDCE task libraries relieve end-users of tedious task implementations and also support reusability. The VDCE software architecture is described in terms of three modules: (a) the Application Editor, a user-friendly application development environment that generates the Application Flow Graph (AFG) of an application; (b) the Application Scheduler, which provides an efficient task-to-resource mapping of AFG; and (c) the VDCE Runtime System, which is responsible for running and managing application execution and for monitoring the VDCE resources. We present experimental results of an application execution on the VDCE prototype for evaluating the performance of different machine and network configurations. We also show how the VDCE can be used as a problem-solving environment on which large-scale, network-centric applications can be developed by a novice programmer rather than by an expert in low-level details of parallel programming languages.