Mobile MPI programs in computational grids

ABSTRACT

Utility computing is becoming a popular way of exploiting the potential of computational grids. In utility computing, users are provided with computational power in a transparent manner similar to the way in which electrical utilities supply power to their customers. To take full advantage of utility computing, an application needs to be mobile; that is, it needs to be able to migrate between heterogeneous computing platforms while it is executing. Further, it needs to be able to adapt to the computing resources at each site, such as the number of available physical processors. At present, there are few high-performance computing applications of this sort, and re-engineering legacy codes to be mobile can take enormous effort.In this paper, we describe theph$PC^3$ system, which converts C/MPI codes into mobile programs almost transparently. Because it is based on portable application-level checkpointing, it enables the state of running applications to be saved so that the application can be restarted on different architectures, operating systems and MPI implementations. Moreover, the number of processors on these machines can be different. To our knowledge, this is the first system to provide all these features. Experimental results show that the overhead introduced by the system is usually small.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.3 Concurrent Programming
          Subjects: Parallel programming

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Fault tolerance

  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Run-time environments
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.5 Reliability
          Subjects: Checkpoint/restart

General Terms:
Measurement, Performance, Reliability

Keywords:
MPI, application-level checkpointing, checkpoint/restart, grid computing, heterogeneity, over-decomposition, portable checkpointing