CAMPUS-WIDE COMPUTING - EARLY RESULTS USING LEGION AT THE UNIVERSITY-OF-VIRGINIA

The Legion project at the University of Virginia is an architecture fo r designing and building system services that provide the illusion of a single virtual machine to users, a virtual machine that provides bot h improved response time via parallel execution and greater throughput . Legion targets workstation clusters and larger wide area assemblies of workstations, supercomputers, and parallel supercomputers. The auth ors have built a working Legion prototype called the Campus-Wide Virtu al Computer (CWVC). The CWVC extends an existing object-oriented paral lel processing system by aggressively incorporating lessons learned in the last 20 years of heterogeneous distributed computing. In this pap er, the authors describe the challenges that they overcame to realize a working CWVC and characterize the performance of a production bioche mistry application.