Metasystems: An Approach Combining Parallel Processing and Heterogeneous Distributed Computing Systems

A metasystem is a single computing resource composed of a heterogeneous group of autonomous computers linked together by a network. The interconnection network needed to construct large metasystems will soon be in place. To fully exploit these new systems, software that is easy to use, supports large degrees of parallelism, and hides the complexity of the underlying physical architecture must be developed. In this paper we describe our metasystem vision, our approach to constructing a metasystem testbed, and early experimental results. Our approach combines features from earlier work on both parallel processing systems and heterogeneous distributed computing systems. Using the testbed we have found that data coercion costs are not a serious obstacle to high performance, but that load imbalance induced by differing processor capabilities can limit performance. We then present a mechanism to overcome load imbalance that utilizes user-provided callbacks.1 Send correspondence to: Andrew Grimshaw Department of Computer Science Olsson Hall University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 804-982-2204 Fax: 804-982-2214 [email protected] 1. This work partially funded by NSF grants ASC-9201822 and CDA-8922545-01, NASA grant NGT-50970, and NLM grant LM04969.