An Android cluster system capable of dynamic node reconfiguration

Abstract

In recent years, high-performance mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet devices spread rapidly. They have attracted attention as a new platform for parallel and distributed applications. Based on this background, we are developing a cluster computer system using wireless-connected mobile devices running Android OS. However, since mobile devices can move anywhere, node computers might leave from the cluster, new devices might join the cluster. In this paper, we present an Android cluster system that can reconfigure its system's scale statically and dynamically. The system can automatically detect the change in the number of computation nodes and reconfigure the cluster's nodes, even while parallel and distributed application is running. Furthermore, we show preliminary performance results of our system. It is shown that our cluster provides the scalable performance to the number of nodes in parallel computation. Also, we have confirmed that the runtime overhead caused by checkpointing varies highly depending upon the interval of checkpointing.