As. Grimshaw et al., METASYSTEMS - AN APPROACH COMBINING PARALLEL-PROCESSING AND HETEROGENEOUS DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEMS, Journal of parallel and distributed computing, 21(3), 1994, pp. 257-270
Citations number
31
Categorie Soggetti
Computer Sciences","Computer Science Theory & Methods
A metasystem is a single computing resource composed of a heterogeneou
s group of autonomous computers linked together by a network. The inte
rconnection network needed to construct large metasystems will soon be
in place. To fully exploit these new systems, software that is easy t
o use, supports large degrees of parallelism, and hides the complexity
of the underlying physical architecture must be developed. In this pa
per we describe our metasystem vision, our approach to constructing a
metasystem testbed, and early experimental results. Our approach combi
nes features from earlier work on both parallel processing systems and
heterogeneous distributed computing systems. Using the testbed, we ha
ve found that data coercion costs are not a serious obstacle to high p
erformance, but that load imbalance induced by differing processor cap
abilities can limit performance. We then present a mechanism to overco
me load imbalance that utilizes user-provided callbacks. (C) 1994 Acad
emic Press, Inc.