Technical Report No . MSSU – EIRS – ERC – 97 – 8 Dynamic Communication Mechanism Switching in Hector by Samuel

– As parallel library standards make it easier to use networks of workstations for large computational jobs, concentration must be placed on the underlying communication mechanism used by the library. Also, with dynamic resource allocation schemes and task migration, it is now possible to move tasks in mid–execution to exploit architectures that offer faster communication networks. This paper describes the work involved in modifying Hector, our automatic resource allocation system for networked workstations, for dynamic communication mechanism switching and the overall performance gain that can be achieved with this addition. The ability to change the communication mechanism, for example, from Ethernet to shared memory in mid–execution, coupled with Hector, can optimize parallel program task placement to take advantage of the fastest available communication network.