The emergence and widespread adoption of Grid computing has been fueled by continued growth in both our understanding of application requirements and the sophistication of the technologies used to meet these requirements. We provide an introduction to Grid applications and technologies and discuss the important role that resource management will play in future developments.

Grid resource management: state of the art and future trends

Charlotte: metacomputing on the Web

This invention generally relates to one or more computer networks having computers like personal computers or network servers with microprocessors linked by broadband transmission means and having hardware, software, firmware, and other means such that at least one parallel processing operation occurs that involve at least two computers in the network. More particularly, this invention relates to one or more large networks composed of smaller networks and large numbers of computers connected, like the Internet, wherein more than one separate parallel processing operation involving more than one different set of computers occurs simultaneously and wherein ongoing processing linkages can be established between virtually any microprocessors of separate computers connected to the network. Still more particularly, this invention relates to business arrangements enabling the shared used of network microprocessors for parallel and other processing, wherein personal computer owners provide microprocessor processing power to a network, preferably for parallel processing, in exchange for network linkage to other personal and other computers supplied by network providers, including linkage to other microprocessors for parallel or other processing; the basis of the exchange between owners and providers being whatever terms to which the parties agree, subject to governing laws, regulations, or rules, including payment from either party to the other based on periodic measurement of net use or provision of processing power.

Global network computers

Computing on large-scale distributed systems: Xtrem Web architecture, programming models, security, tests and convergence with grid

The JAVM (Java Astra Virtual Machine) project is about harnessing the immense computational resource available in the Internet for parallel processing. In this paper, the suitability of Java for Internet-based parallel computing is explored. Next, existing implementations of systems that make use of Java for network parallel computing are presented and categorized. A critique of these implementations follows. Basing on the critique, the requirements and goals of an effective parallel computing system in the Internet environment are singled out. These serve as the blueprint for the development of the JAVM system. Its infrastructure and features, namely ease of use, heterogeneity, portability, security, fault tolerance, load balancing, scalability and accountability, are discussed. Lastly, experimental results based on the running of several parallel applications in the JAVM environment are presented. Basing on the results, the kind of parallel applications that would be well suited for running in JAVM are identified.

Javelin: Internet-based parallel computing using Java

In this paper, we describe the design of a system, called ParaWeb, for utilizing Internet or intra-net computing resources in a seamless fashion. The goal is to allow users to execute serial programs on faster compute servers or parallel programs on a variety of possibly heterogeneous hosts. ParaWeb provides extensions to the Java programming environment (through a parallel class library) and the Java runtime system that allow programmers to develop new Java applications with parallelism in mind, or to execute existing Java applications written using Java's multithreading facilities in parallel. Some experimental results from our prototype implementation are used to demonstrate the potential of this approach.

ParaWeb: towards world-wide supercomputing

In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of a new distributed shared memory (DSM) coherence model called multiple-writer entry consistency (MEC). MEC combines the efficient communication mechanisms of Lazy Release Consistency (LRC) with the flexible data management of the Shared Regions [17, 11] and Entry Consistency (EC) models [5]. This is achieved in MEC by decoupling synchronization from coherence (in contrast to the tight coupling of synchronization and coherence present in EC)while retaining the familiar synchronization structure found in Release Consistent (RC) programs. The advantage of MEC is that it allows region-based coherence protocols (those that manage data at the granularity of user-defined shared regions) to be used along side page-based protocols within an application and within the RC framework. Our experimental evaluation on an 8 processor system shows that using MEC reduces parallel execution times by margins ranging from 5% to 46% in five of the six applications that we study. However, the parallel execution time of the LRC version of the remaining application is lower than the MEC version by 48%. We conclude that offering both page-based and region-based models for coherence within the same system is not only practical but necessary.

Multiple-writer entry consistency

In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of a new distributed shared memory (DSM) coherence model called multiple-writer entry consistency (MEC). MEC combines the efficient communication mechanisms of Lazy Release Consistency (LRC) with the flexible data management of the Shared Regions and Entry Consistency (EC) models. This is achieved in MEC by decoupling synchronization from coherence (in contrast to the tight coupling of synchronization and coherence present in EC) while retaining the familiar synchronization structure found in Release Consistent (RC) programs. The advantage of MEC is that it allows region-based coherence protocols (those that manage data at the granularity of user-defined shared regions) to be used along side page-based protocols within an application and within the RC framework. Our experimental evaluation on an 8 processor system shows that using MEC reduces parallel execution times by margins ranging from 5% to 46% in five of the six applications that we study. However, the parallel execution time of the LRC version of the remaining application is lower than the MEC version by 48%. We conclude that offering both page-based and region-based models for coherence within the same system is not only practical but necessary.

Harjinder Sandhu

Papers

ParaWeb: towards world-wide supercomputing

Multiple-writer entry consistency

Multiple-Writer Entry Consistency