NPAC Technical Report SCCS-705
Application Development and Excution in a Virtual Computing Environment
Philip Rousselle, Rajesh Yadav, Salim Hariri, Dongmin Kim, Suresh Boddapati, Paul Tymann
Submitted April 4 1995
Abstract
As the size and complexity of high performance
computing a pplications continue to increase, their
computing, storage and connectivity requirements
become more and more difficult to accommodate on any
single computing platform. The Virtual Computing
Environment (VCE) combines heterogeneous computing,
storage and network resources into a flexible system
for the execution of large scale applications.
Current systems for managing distributed applications
employ static allocation policies which are difficult
to scale to large networks made up of geographically
dispersed resources connected by high speed network
technology (e.g. ATM). In this paper we present an
application description framework which is used to
develop large scale applications in the VCE. We also
discuss two methods for scheduling tasks in the VCE:
one emphasizes redundant task scheduling while the
other emphasizes a more con ventional use of load
measurement techniques to select less loaded computers to
run application tasks. Several example applications are
included and used to demonstrate the performance of a
Virtual Computing Environment which employs an IBM SP2
supercomputer, a cluster of DEC Alpha workstations, and
a cluster of Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations
interconnected by an ATM network.