Adaptive Receiver Notification for Non-Dedicated Workstation Clusters
Michael Schmitt, Maximilian Ibel, Anurag Acharya, Klaus Erik Schauser · 1998
Efficient communication in a NOW environment can be a challenging task. Depending on the application, the architecture of the nodes and the characteristics of other processes running on the nodes, different communication mechanisms can be appropriate. In this paper, we evaluate an adaptive strategy which provides multiple communication mechanisms and selects between them depending on the current situation. We focus on strategies for receiver notification under varying load conditions. Previous research has shown that in a non-dedicated environment, spin-block strategies can avoid scheduling anomalies which can cause several orders of magnitude of performance degradation. However, research on these strategies have focused on fixed spin-delay. We investigate an adaptive strategy that uses runtime information to select the spin-delay in an online manner. Our strategy achieves better performance than static spin-block strategies on workstation clusters with varying load. 1 Introduction Ne...