A Peer-to-Peer Framework for Message Passing Parallel Programs

International audienceThis chapter describes the P2P-MPI project, a software framework aimed at the development of message-passing programs in large scale distributed networks of computers. Our goal is to provide a light-weight, self-contained software package that requires minimum effort to use and maintain. P2P-MPI relies on three features to reach this goal: i) its installation and use does not require administrator privileges, ii) available resources are discovered and selected for a computation without intervention from the user, iii) program executions can be fault-tolerant on user demand, in a completely transparent fashion (no checkpoint server to configure). P2P-MPI is typically suited for organizations having spare individual computers linked by a high speed network, possibly running heterogeneous operating systems, and having Java applications. From a technical point of view, the framework has three layers: an infrastructure management layer at the bottom, a middleware layer containing the services, and the communication layer implementing an MPJ (Message Passing for Java) communication library at the top. We explain the design and the implementation of these layers, and we discuss the allocation strategy based on network locality to the submitter. Allocation experiments of more than five hundreds peers are presented to validate the implementation. We also present how fault-management issues have been tackled. First, the monitoring of the infrastructure itself is implemented through the use of failure detectors. We theoretically evaluate several candidate protocols for these detectors to motivate our choice for the gossiping protocol called binary round robin. A variant of this protocol is also proposed for a greater reliability. Finally, the system scalability and the theoretical findings are validated through experiments. The second aspect of fault management concerns program executions. Fault-tolerance is provided by the communication library through replication of processes. We describe the underlying protocol and the properties that need to be met in order to insure the correctness of execution. We then discuss how to choose the number of replicas by quantifying how much more robust is an application using replication, depending on the failure model parameters