Dynamite - Blasting Obstacles to Parallel Cluster Computing

. Workstations make up a very large fraction of the total available computing capacity in many organisations. In order to use this capacity optimally, dynamic allocation of computing resources is needed. The Esprit project Dynamite addresses this load balancing problem through the migration of tasks in a dynamically linked parallel program. An important goal of the project is to accomplish this in a manner that is transparent both to the application programmer and to the user. As a test bed, the Pam-Crash software from ESI is used. Introduction Workstations have become ubiquitous in many organisations. By their nature, they are often used intensively during normal working hours, and are often largely idle otherwise. They represent a huge reservoir of computing capacity that can be used much more efficiently. Thus, we currently witness a shift of emphasis in high-performance computing from expensive, special-purpose monolithic systems to the use of clusters of workstations or ..