I/O in the Gardens Non-Dedicated Cluster Computing Environment

Gardens is an integrated programming language and system designed to support parallel computing across nondedicated cluster computers, in particular networks of PCs. To utilise non-dedicated machines a program must adapt to those currently available. In Gardens this is realised by over decomposing a program into more tasks than processors, and migrating tasks to implement adaptation. Communication in Gardens is achieved via a lightweight form of remote method invocation. Furthermore I/O may be efficiently achieved by the same mechanism. All that is required is to support stable tasks which are not migrated these are effectively bound to resources such as filesystems. The main contribution of this paper is to show how I/O may be achieved in an adaptive system utilising task migration to harness the power of non-dedicated cluster computers.