Optimising heterogeneous task migration in the Gardens virtual cluster computer
Ashley Beitz, S. Kent, Paul Roe · 2002
Gardens is an integrated programming language and system designed to support parallel computing across nondedicated cluster computers, in particular networks of PCs. To utilise non-dedicated machines a program must adapt to those currently available. In Gardens this is realised by over decomposing a program into more tasks than processors, and migrating tasks to implement adaptation. To be effective this requires efficient task migration. Furthermore, typically non-dedicated clusters contain different machines hence heterogeneous task migration is required. Gardens supports efficient task migration between heterogeneous machines via meta-information which completely describes a task's state. By identifying different degrees of heterogeneity and different kinds of tasks, we are able to optimise task migration. The main contribution is to show how heterogeneous task migration may be optimised.