Mapping of coarse-grained applications onto workstation clusters.
Thomas Decker, Ralf Diekmann · 1997
. We present an environment for configuring and co-ordinating coarse grained parallel applications on workstation clusters. The environment named CoPA is based on PVM and allows an automatic distribution of functional modules as they occur in typical CAE-applications. By implementing link-based communication on top of PVM, CoPA is able to perform a "post-game" analysis of the communication load between different modules. Together with the computational load which is also determined automatically by CoPA, all necessary information is available to calculate an optimized mapping for the next run of the application. To optimize the distribution of modules onto workstations CoPA uses state-of-the-art partitioning heuristics as well as Simulated Annealing. Measurements show the large improvements in running time obtained by using optimization heuristics to determine the mapping. 1 Introduction A balanced distribution of data objects or program modules is one of the most important premises f...