The Albatross Project: Parallel Application Support for Computational Grids.
Thilo Kielmann, Henri E. Bal, Jason Maassen, Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Ronald Veldema, Rutger F. H. Hofman, Ceriel J. H. Jacobs, Kees Verstoep · VU Research Portal · 2000
The aim of the Albatross project is to study applications and programming environments for computational grids consisting of multiple clusters that are connected by wide-area networks. Parallel processing on such systems is useful but challenging, given the large differences in latency and bandwidth between LANs and WANs. We provide efficient algorithms and programming environments that exploit the hierarchical structure of wide-area clusters to minimize communication over the WANs. In addition, we use highly efficient local-area communication protocols. We illustrate this approach using the Manta high-performance Java system and the MagPIe MPI library, both of which are implemented on a collection of four Myrinet-based clusters connected by wide-area ATM networks. Our sample applications obtain high speedups on this wide-area system. 1 Introduction As computational grids become more widely available, it becomes feasible to run parallel applications on multiple clusters at d...