Dealing with Heterogeneity in Stardust: an Environment for Parallel Programming on Networks of Heterogeneous Workstations

. This paper describes the management of heterogeneity in Stardust, an environment for parallel programming above networks of heterogeneous machines, which can include distributed memory multicomputers and networks of workstations. Applications using Stardust can communicate both through message passing and distributed shared memory. Stardust is currently implemented on an heterogeneous system including an Intel Paragon running Mach/OSF1 and an ATM network of Pentiums running Chorus/classiX. 1 Introduction The proliferation of inexpensive and powerful workstations has continued to increase at a rapid rate in the last few years. This increase of machine performance is likely to continue for several years, with faster processors and multiprocessor machines. Studies have shown that for a large percentage of their lifetime, the machines are used for small tasks, thus demonstrating an average idle percentage of at least 90% even during peak hours. One possible use of these idle cycles is t..