Parallel Computing on Wide-Area Clusters: the Albatross Project,
Henri E. Bal, Aske Plaat, Thilo Kielmann, Jason Maassen, Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Ronald Veldema · 1999
The aim of the Albatross project is to study applications and programming environments for widearea cluster computers, which consist of multiple clusters 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 apply application-level optimizations 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 a highperformance Java system that is implemented on a collection of four Myrinet-based clusters connected by wide-area ATM networks. The optimized applications obtain high speedups on this wide-area system. 1 Introduction As cluster computers become more widely available, it becomes feasible to run parallel applications on multiple clusters at different geographic locations. By using several clusters for a single appli...