Progress towards petascale virtual machines

Abstract

PVM continues to be a popular software package both for creating personal grids and for building adaptable, fault tolerant applications. We will illustrate this by describing a computational biology environment built on top of PVM that is used by researchers around the world. We will then describe or recent progress in building an even more adaptable distributed virtual machine package called Harness. The Harness project includes research on a scalable, self-adapting core called H2O, and research on fault tolerant MPI. The H2O core can be configured to support distributed web computing like SETI@home, parallel virtual machines like PVM, and OGSA compliant grid environments. The Harness software is being designed to scale to petascale virtual machines. We will describe work at Oak Ridge National Lab on developing algorithms for such petascale virtual machines and the development of a simulator to test these algorithms on simulated 100,000 processor systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.