Cooperating Runtime Systems in Lips

Performing computation using networks of workstations is increasingly becoming an alternative to using a supercomputer This approach is motivated by the vast quantities of un used idle time available in workstation networks Unlike computing on a tightly coupled parallel computer where a xed number of processor nodes is used within a computation the number of usable nodes in a workstation network is constantly changing over time Additionally workstations are more frequently subject to outages e g due to reboots The question arises how applications adapting smoothly to this environment should be realized LiPS is a system for distributed computing using idle cycles in networks of workstations This system in its version is currently used at the Universit at des Saarlandes in Saarbr ucken Germany to perform computationally intensive applications in the eld of cryptography on a net of approximately workstations and should be enhanced to work within an environment of more than machines all over the world within the next years In this paper we present the runtime systems of LiPS along with performance measurements taken with the current LiPS development version