SPEDE – A Simple Programming Environment for Distributed Execution

One of the main goals for people who use computer systems, particularly computational scientists, is speed. In the quest for ways to make applications run faster, engineers have developed parallel computers, which use more than one CPU to solve a task. However, many institutions already posses significant computational power in networks of workstations. Through software, it is possible to glue together clusters of machines to simulate a parallel environment. SPEDE is one such system, designed to place the potential of local machines at the fingertips of the programmer. Through a simple interface, users design computational objects that can be linked and run in parallel. The goal of the project is to have a small portable environment that allows various types of computer systems to interact. SPEDE requires no altering of the kernel and does not require system privileges to use. Using SPEDE, programmers can get significant speedup for computationally intensive problems. As an example, a Mandelbrot image generator was implemented, that attained a five-fold speedup with eight processors