Dome: Parallel Programming in a Heteroge-neous Multi-User Environment

Writing parallel programs for distributed multi-user computing environments is a difficult task. The Distributed object migration environment (Dome) addresses three major issues of parallel computing in an architecture independent manner: ease of programming, dynamic load balancing, and fault tolerance. Dome programmers, with modest effort, can write parallel programs that are automatically distributed over a heterogeneous network, dynamically load balanced as the program runs, and able to survive compute node and network failures. This paper provides the motivation for and an overview of Dome, including a preliminary performance evaluation of dynamic load balancing for distributed vectors. Dome programs are shorter and easier to write than the equivalent programs written with message passing primitives. The performance overhead of Dome is characterized, and it is shown that this overhead can be recouped by dynamic load balancing in imbalanced systems. Finally, we show that a parallel program can be made failure resilient through Dome''s architecture independent checkpoint and restart mechanisms.