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Malleable iterative MPI applications
Author(s) -
El Maghraoui K.,
Desell Travis J.,
Szymanski Boleslaw K.,
Varela Carlos A.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.1362
Subject(s) - malleability , computer science , merge (version control) , control reconfiguration , distributed computing , granularity , middleware (distributed applications) , message passing , process (computing) , parallel computing , operating system , embedded system , encryption , ciphertext
Malleability enables a parallel application's execution system to split or merge processes modifying granularity. While process migration is widely used to adapt applications to dynamic execution environments, it is limited by the granularity of the application's processes. Malleability empowers process migration by allowing the application's processes to expand or shrink following the availability of resources. We have implemented malleability as an extension to the process checkpointing and migration (PCM) library, a user‐level library for iterative message passing interface (MPI) applications. PCM is integrated with the Internet Operating System, a framework for middleware‐driven dynamic application reconfiguration. Our approach requires minimal code modifications and enables transparent middleware‐triggered reconfiguration. Experimental results using a two‐dimensional data parallel program that has a regular communication structure demonstrate the usefulness of malleability. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.