On Honey Bees and Dynamic Server Allocation in Internet Hosting Centers
Adaptive Behavior - Animals, Animats, Software Agents, Robots, Adaptive Systems
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This paper presents the design and the implementation of a resource management system for monitoring computing resources on a network and for dynamically allocating them to concurrently executing jobs. In particular, it is designed to support adaptive parallel computations---computations that benefit from addition of new machines, and can tolerate removal of machines while executing. The challenge for such a resource manager is to communicate the availability of resources to running programs even when the programs were not developed to work with external resource managers. Our main contribution is a novel mechanism addressing this issue, built on low-level features common to popular parallel programming systems. Existing resource management systems for adaptive computations either require tight integration with the operating system (DRMS), or require an integration with a programming system that is aware of external resource managers (e.g. Condor/CARMI, MPVM, Piranha). Thus in each case, their support is limited to a single type of programming system. In contrast, our resource management system is unique in supporting several unmodified parallel programming systems. Furthermore, the system runs with user-level privilege, and thus can not compromise the security of the network. The underlying mechanism and the overall system have been validated on a dynamically changing mix of jobs, some sequential, some PVM, some MPI, and some Calypso computations. We demonstrate the feasibility and the usefulness of our approach, thus showing how to construct a middleware resource management system to enhance the utilizations of distributed systems.