Runtime support for automatic wide area implementation management in legion
Michael Lewis, Andrew S. Grimshaw · 2005
Computational grids have the potential to give programmersaccess to a much larger set and wider range of underlyingcomputing resources than currently possible. To be useful in this capacity, however, grids must address the problems of heterogeneity, multiple disjoint administrative domains, and scale. This paper describes the Legion implementationmodel, which prescribes how active objects are created and managed in the face of these problems. The Legion wide area metasystem maintains object executablesin architecture-specific binary format, and automaticallydownloads and executes the appropriate binary for theplatform on which the object is to run. The implementationmodel relieves the programmer from requiring an individualaccount on all the machines or domains on which herobjects may run, and from explicitly installing programsthroughout the metasystem. Instead, programmers have asingle account, register executables once, with Legion, andcan then potentially utilize all the machines in the system.