I/O in the Gardens Non-Dedicated Cluster Computing Environment

Gardens is an integrated programming language and system designed to support parallel computing across nondedicated cluster computers, in particular networks of PCs. To utilise non-dedicated machines a program must adapt to those currently available. In Gardens this is realised by over decomposing a program into more tasks than processors, and migrating tasks to implement adaptation. Communication in Gardens is achieved via a lightweight form of remote method invocation. Furthermore I/O may be efficiently achieved by the same mechanism. All that is required is to support stable tasks which are not migrated - these are effectively bound to resources such as filesystems. The main contribution of this paper is to show how I/O may be achieved in an adaptive system utilising task migration to harness the power of non-dedicated cluster computers. 1 Introduction In the aggregate networks of workstations represent a huge and cheap unused computing resource. By their very nature such non-dedi..