Extending modern PaaS clouds with BSP to execute legacy MPI applications

Abstract

As the popularity of cloud computing continues to increase, a significant amount of legacy code implemented using older parallel computing standards is outdated and left behind. This forces the organizations to port the old applications into new cloud platforms. This, however, violates the "develop once - run anywhere" principle promised by utility computing. As a solution to this problem, we explore the possibility of executing unmodified MPI applications over a modern parallel computing platform. Using BSP as a bridging model between MPI and the Hadoop framework, we implement a prototype MPI runtime for today's computing clouds, which eliminates the overhead of porting legacy code.