Extending the Open Community Runtime with External Application Support

The Open Community Runtime specification prescribes the way a task-parallel application has to be written, in order to give the runtime system the ability to automatically migrate work and data, provide fault tolerance, improve portability, etc. These constraints prevent an application from efficiently starting a new process to run another external program. We have designed an extension of the specification which provides exactly this functionality in a way that fits the task-based model. The bulk of our work is devoted to exploring the way the task-parallel application can interact with an external application without having to resort to using files on a physical drive for data exchange. To eliminate the need to make changes to the external application, the data is exposed via a virtual file system using the filesystem-in-userspace architecture.