MetaSystems: An Approach Combining Parallel Processing and Heterogeneous Distributed Computing Systems

Large metasystems comprised of a variety of interconnected high-performance architectures are becoming available to researchers. To fully exploit these new systems, software must be provided that is easy to use, supports large degrees of parallelism in applications code, and manages the complexity of the underlying physical architecture for the user. This paper describes our approach to constructing and exploiting metasystems. Our approach inherits features of earlier work on parallel processing systems and heterogeneous distributed computing systems. In particular, we build on Mentat, an object-oriented parallel processing system developed at the University of Virginia that provides large amounts of easy-to-use parallelism for MIMD architectures. 1 1.0 Introduction The task of programming parallel MIMD architectures is plagued by three problems. First, writing parallel programs by hand is very difficult. The programmer must manage communication, synchronization, and scheduling of te..