Quasi-opportunistic Supercomputing in Grid Environments

Abstract

The ultimate vision of grid computing are virtual supercomputers of unprecedented power, through utilization of geographically dispersed distributively owned resources. Despite the overwhelming success of grids there still exist many demanding applications considered the exclusive prerogative of real supercomputers (i.e. tightly coupled parallel applications like complex systems simulations). These rely on a static execution environment with predictable performance, provided through efficient co-allocation of a large number of reliable interconnected resources. In this paper, we describe a novel quasi-opportunistic supercomputersystem that enables execution of demanding parallel applications in grids through identification and implementation of the set of key technologies required to realize the vision of grids as (virtual) supercomputers. These technologies include an incentive-based framework basic on ideas from economics; a co-allocation subsystem that is enhanced by communication topology-aware allocation mechanisms; a fault tolerant message passing library that hides the failures of the underlying resources; and data pre-staging orchestration.