Supporting parallel computing on a distributed object architecture

The availability of high-speed networks and increasingly powerful commodity microprocessors is making the usage of clusters, or networks, of computers an appealing platform for cost e€ective parallel computing. However, the ease of developing ecient high-performance parallel software to exploit these platforms presents a major challenge. Advances in distributed object software technology have made the management of distributed computing resources easier than before. This also brings many bene®ts for parallel computing. Firstly, distributed object technology facilitates the encapsulating of parallel computing resources into a uniform model despite their di€erences in implementations that are based on di€erent languages executing on di€erent platforms. Secondly, mature object-oriented analysis, design method, as well as component idea embodied in distributed object technology can enhance the reusability of parallel software. To support parallel computing in a distributed object-based computing platform, a uniform high performance distributed object architecture layer is necessary. In this paper, we propose a distributed object-based framework called DoHPC to support parallel computing on distributed object architectures. We present the use of dependence analysis technique to exploit intra-object parallelism and an interoperability model for supporting distributed parallel objects. Experimental results on a Fujitsu AP3000 workstation cluster consisting of a cluster of 32 UltraSPARC workstations show that the implementation of inter-object parallelism on a workstation cluster environment is ecient. With intra-object parallel computation speedup eciency is greater than 90% and with overhead of less than 10% for large problem, and the interoperability model improves speedup by 20%.