POENDOM: A Parallel Operating Environment on a Network
of DOS Machines
Abstract:
Parallel computing on a cluster of workstations and personal computers
has very high potential since it leverages the existing hardware and software.
Parallel programming environment offers the user a convenient way to express
parallel computation and communication. A lot of work has been done in
synthesizing distributed memory parallel machines from a cluster of workstations.
However, such a parallel environment is not supported on a network of DOS
machines.
POENDOM, Parallel Operating Environment on a Network of DOS Machines
provides a master process for job mapping and configuration management
and several slave processes for job spawning on client nodes in coordination
with the master process. The MPL (Message Passing Library) provided by
POENDOM can be used to develop coarse grained parallel applications which
can be executed in POENDOM environment. MPL supports message passing interfaces
for point-to-point communication, collective communication, and for synchronization
among different nodes working on the same problem. MDF (Multi-Dimensional-Files)
library provides interfaces which deal with special files called multi-dimensional-files,
suitable for writing parallel programs using the data parallelism paradigm.
The emulated parallel machine of POENDOM consists of a master (host) node
and several slave (remote) nodes. The master node accesses a user specified
configuration file and distributes the tasks to slave nodes. On task mapping,
master node and slave nodes will collectively solve the problem. This paper
presents the design and implementation of POENDOM which includes master
and slave processes. It also discusses MPL and MDF libraries.
Click here to download the POENDOM Paper
(which is in Postscript format)
Appeared in: The 4th International Conference on Avanced Computing,
1996.