A new massively parallel and distributed virtual machine model using mobile agents

Abstract

The goal of this paper, is to present a new massively parallel virtual machine model, designed for parallel and distributed high performance computing on a distributed system. The proposed model allows us to build a polymorphic grid computing assigned to solve fine grained parallel problems over different machine structures. This model is built using distributed Virtual Processors Units (VPU). Each VPU corresponds to a mobile agent deployed in a physical processing unit. Each physical processing unit is associated to a node of the distributed system. The VPUs are designed to communicate with each other asynchronously by exchanging, in local or remote way, ACL messages (Agent Communication Language) containing data, instructions or any task to be performed. In this model a special agent is designed to represent the host of the parallel virtual machine. This agent manages the life cycle of VPUs, the load balancing system, and parallel applications to run. In this model VPUs can also use a virtual shared memory represented by hierarchical mobile agents. All the properties offered to the proposed model, are easily designed thanks to the flexibility and the mobility of the multi agent systems.