Dynamite - Blasting Obstacles to Parallel Cluster Computing

Workstations make up a very large fraction of the total available computing capacity in many organisations. In order to use this capacity optimally, dynamic allocation of computing resources is needed. The Esprit project Dynamite addresses this load balancing problem through the migration of tasks in a dynamically linked parallel program. An important goal of the project is to accomplish this in a manner that is transparent both to the application programmer and to the user. Our approach adds the migration of dynamically linked tasks, of tasks with open files and with direct PVM connections to earlier versions of DPVM. The system is now provided with monitoring and scheduling software. As a test bed, the Pam-Crash software from ESI is used.