[Acpc-l] Vortrag HEUTE: Prof. Andrzej M. Goscinski

[Peter Brezany]

	   UNIVERSITAET WIEN INSTITUT FUER SOFTWAREWISSENSCHAFT
			      gemeinsam mit
	    FWF-Projekt Spezialforschungsbereich F011 "AURORA"


       EINLADUNG ZU EINEM VORTRAG IM RAHMEN DES AURORA-KOLLOQUIUMS

	      ZEIT:  Montag, 24. 9. 2001, 17.15 Uhr s.t.
		ORT:  Institut fuer Softwarewissenschaft,
		      1090 Wien, Liechtensteinstrasse 22, 
	                      Seminarraum, Mezzanin
	                      
	                      
	                 Prof. Andrzej M.  Goscinski
		    School of Computing and Mathematics 
		             Deakin University
                    Geelong, Victoria 3217, Australia


                   Toward an Operating System that Supports 
                Parallel Processing on Nondedicated Clusters

	
Abstract:

Universities, banks and other institutions have already acquired nondedicated
clusters.  These clusters consist of commodity components such as PCs connected
by fast networks.  However, the single factor limiting the harnessing of the
enormous computing power of these clusters for parallel computing is the lack of
appropriate software.  Present operating systems are not built to support
parallel computing.  Programmers must deal not only with programming of
communication and coordination of parallel processes to achieve the correct
execution of an application, but also with the problems of initialization and
control of the execution on the cluster.  Users do not see a cluster as a single
powerful computer.  Cluster-based parallel systems are seen as being user
unfriendly, due to their complexity.  Ease of use of parallel systems and
programmer's time are neglected.  This approach discourages application
developers from parallel processing, as they have to program many activities,
which are of an operating system natu re, in particular those of the
initialisation and termination phases.  These activities should be carried out
automatically by a cluster operating system to relieve programmers from error
prone and time-consuming activities.  Furthermore, in the majority of execution
environments programmers of parallel application cannot make a choice between
the message passing and distributed shared memory communication paradigm.  These
communication paradigms and the systems supporting them are treated
independently of an operating system, rather than to be parts of a comprehensive
operating system as they manage system resources.  We claim that the current
situation is caused by the fact that present operating systems do not provide
services to manage parallelism.  Managing the available parallelism in a cluster
means managing parallel processes and computational resources, in order to
achieve high performance and use computational resources efficiently, and to
make programming and use of the parallel system easy.  In this talk an overview
of our work carried out toward the development of cluster operating systems that
automatically and dynamically support parallel processing is presented.  There
are a number of aims of this talk.  The first aim is to identify and discuss the
basic issues of and solutions to the problem of the management of parallel
processing on clusters.  The second aim is to propose a new class of cluster
operating systems that provide these services.  In particular, these operating
systems should:  guarantee high performance of parallel processing on clusters
and the efficient use of resources; support execution on a cluster of both
message passing and shared memory based parallel applications; relieve
programmers from error prone and time consuming work of allocation of processes
to computers, management of interprocess communication and process
synchronisation; provide transparency; and make the whole cluster based parallel
system easy to use.  The third aim is to provide a "proof-of-concept" by introdu
cing the architecture and services of a cluster operating system, called
GENESIS, that allow the above specified goals to be achieved.  The fourth aim is
to report on the performance of parallel processing of applications executed in
the GENESIS environment.