Programming environments for high-performance grid computing: the Albatross project

  • Authors:
  • Thilo Kielmann;Henri E. Bal;Jason Maassen;Rob van Nieuwpoort;Lionel Eyraud;Rutger Hofman;Kees Verstoep

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France;Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Future Generation Computer Systems - Grid computing: Towards a new computing infrastructure
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

The aim of the Albatross project is to study applications and programming environments for computational Grids. We focus on high-performance applications, running in parallel on multiple clusters or MPPs that are connected by wide-area networks (WANs). We briefly present three Grid programming environments developed in the context of the Albatross project: the MagPIe library for collective communication with MPI, the replicated method invocation (RepMI) mechanism for Java, and the Java-based Satin system for running divide-and-conquer programs on Grid platforms.A major challenge in investigating the performance of such applications is the actual WAN behavior. Typical wide-area links are just part of the Internet and thus shared among many applications, making runtime measurements irreproducible and thus scientifically hardly valuable. To overcome this problem, we developed a WAN emulator as part of Panda, our general-purpose communication substrate. The WAN emulator allows us to run parallel applications on a single (large) parallel machine with only the wide-area links being emulated. The Panda emulator is highly accurate and configurable at runtime. We present a case study in which Satin runs across various emulated WAN scenarios.