Parallel Computing on Wide-Area Clusters: the Albatross Project

Henri E. Bal Aske Plaat Thilo Kielmann Jason Maassen Rob van Nieuwpoort Ronald Veldema Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands fbal,aske,kielmann,jason,rob,[email protected] http://www.cs.vu.nl/albatross/ Abstract The aim of the Albatross project is to study applications and programming environments for widearea cluster computers, which consist of multiple clusters connected by wide-area networks. Parallel processing on such systems is useful but challenging, given the large di erences in latency and bandwidth between LANs and WANs. We apply application-level optimizations that exploit the hierarchical structure of wide-area clusters to minimize communication over the WANs. In addition, we use highly e cient local-area communication protocols. We illustrate this approach using a highperformance Java system that is implemented on a collection of four Myrinet-based clusters connected by wide-area ATM networks. The optimized applications obtain high speedups on this wide-area system.