Flexible Management on BSP Process Rescheduling: Offering Migration at Middleware and Application Levels

Abstract

This article describes the rationales for developing jMigBSP - a Java programming library that offers object rescheduling. It was designed to work on grid computing environments and offers an interface that follows the BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) style. jMigBSP’s main contribution focuses on the rescheduling facility in two different ways: (i) by using migration directives on the application coded irectly and (ii) through automatic load balancing at middleware level. Especially, this second idea is feasible thanks to the Java’s inheritance feature, in which transforms a simple jMigBSP application in amigratable one only by changing a single line of code. In addition, the presented library makes the object interaction easier by providing one-sided message passing directives and hides network latency through asynchronous communications. Finally, we developed three BSP applications: (i) Prefix Sum; (ii) Fractal Image Compression (FIC) and; (iii) Fast Fourier Transform (FFT).They show our library as viable solution to offer load balancing on BSP applications. Specially, the FIC results present gains up to 37% when applying migration directives inside the code. Finally, the FFT tests emphasize strength of jMigBSP. In this situation, it outperforms a native library denoted BSPlib when migration facilities take place. Keywords: Bulk Synchronous Parallel, rescheduling, Java, adaptation, object migration, grid computing.