Campus-Wide Computing: Early Result Using Legion at the University of Virginia

The Legion project at the University of Virginia is an attempt to provide system services that provide the illusion of a single virtual machine to users, a virtual machine that provides both improved response time via parallel execution and greater throughput. Legion is targeted towards both workstation clusters and towards larger, wide-area, assemblies of workstations, supercomputers, and parallel supercomputers. Rather than construct Legion from scratch we are extending an existing object-oriented parallel processing system by aggressively incorporating lessons learned over twenty years by the heterogeneous distributed systems community. The campus-wide virtual computer is an early Legion prototype. In this paper we present challenges that had to be overcome to realize a working CWVC, as well as performance on a production biochemistry application. 1. Introduction Providing resources to computationally demanding applications at the lowest cost is a challenge facing many organizati..