Parallel Processing on Networks of Workstations: A Fault-Tolerant, High Performance Approach

One of the mostsoughtaftersoftware innovation of thisdecade is the construction of systems using off-the-shelf workstations that actually deliver, and even surpass, the power and reliability of supercomputers. Using completely novel techniques: eager scheduling, evasive memory layouts and dispersed data management, it is possible to build a execution environment for parallel programs on workstation networks. These techniques were originally devela theoretical framework for an abstract machine which models a shared memory asynchronous multiprocessor. The network of workstations platform presents an inherently asynchronous environment for the execution of our parallel program. This gives rise to substantial problems of correctness of the computation and of proper automatic load balancing of the work amongst the processors, so that a slow processor will not hold up the total computation. A limiting case of asynchrony is when a processor becomes infinitely slow, i.e fails. Our methodology...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Partha Dasgupta, Zvi M. Kedem, Michael O. Rabin
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Evasive Memory Layouts, ICDCS 1995, Memory Asynchronous Multiprocessor, Parallel Program