A concurrent process creation service to support SPMD based parallel processing on COWs

Abstract

Current software environments used to support parallel processing on a cluster of workstations (COW) are not satisfactory, do not provide complete transparency and are not specifically designed for parallel processing. In particular, the establishment of a parallel processing environment and the initialisation of parallel processes suffer from poor performance. Each parallel process of an application is created sequentially and in many cases the logon operation must be completed before remote resources could be acquired. These operations are also performed manually. We present in this paper an original approach that addresses the problem of parallel process creation. The remote workstations are acquired completely transparently and dynamically, and parallel processes are created concurrently. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach we show a system based on RHODOS (a client/server and microkernel based distributed operating system), specifically designed to improve the performance of process instantiation and therefore able to improve the overall execution performance of parallel programs, in particular parallel process creation. Copyright  1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.