The HARNESS PVM-Proxy: gluing PVM applications to distributed object environments and applications

Abstract

Metacomputing frameworks have received renewed attention of late, fueled both by advances in hardware and networking, and by novel concepts such as computational grids. HARNESS is an experimental metacomputing system based upon the principle of dynamic reconfigurability, not only in terms of the computers and networks that comprise the virtual machine (VM), but also in the capabilities of the VM itself. These characteristics may be modified under user control via a "plug-in" mechanism that is the central feature of the system. The system's capabilities have been used to develop a PVM compatibility suite, i.e. a set of plug-ins that allow users to run PVM applications of top of HARNESS. In this paper, we describe the PVM-Proxy plug-in, which is capable of gluing PVM applications to distributed object environments.