Performance of Android Cluster System Allowing Dynamic Node Reconfiguration

Abstract

Recently, high-performance mobile computer devices such as smart phones and tablet devices spread rapidly. They have attracted attention as a new promising platform for parallel and distributed applications. Based on the background, we are developing a cluster computer system using mobile devices or single board computers running Android OS. However, since mobile devices can move anywhere, node computers might leave from the cluster and new nodes might join the cluster. In this paper, we present an Android Cluster system that can reconfigure the system's scale dynamically. Our 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. The results show that our cluster provides the scalable performance to the number of nodes in parallel computation. Finally, it is confirmed that the mechanism of load balancing per process basis and the mechanism of switching to efficient data communication method can reduce the execution time of parallel applications. Our evaluation result shows that the execution time can be reduced up to 11.8% by load balancing per process basis, as compared to the load balancing per node basis, and shows that the execution time can be reduced 68% at maximum, by switching the communication method between processes to efficient one.