A Migratable User-Level Process Package for PVM

A Migratable User-Level Process Package for PVM Ravindranath Bala Konuru Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology Supervising Professors: Steve Otto and Jonathan Walpole This dissertation studies an approach to supporting e cient processor virtualization and dynamic load balancing for message-based, parallel programs. We propose the User-Level Process (ULP) abstraction that can be used to implement e cient local communication and transparent migration. The viability of ULPs is demonstrated through UPVM, a prototype implementation of the PVM message passing interface using ULPs. Typically, PVM programs written in Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) style need only be re-compiled to use this package. The design of the package is presented and the performance analyzed with respect to both micro-benchmarks and some complete PVM applications. Finally, we discuss aspects of the ULP package that a ect its portability and its support for heterogeneity, application transparency, and application debugging. xi Chapter