Architectural Support for Extensibility and Autonomy in Wide-Area Distributed Object Systems

The Legion system defines a software architecture designed to support metacomputing, the use of large collections of heterogeneous computing resources distributed across local- and wide-area networks as a single, seamless virtual machine. Metasystems software must be extensible because no single system can meet all of the diverse, often conflicting, requirements of the entire present and future user community, nor can a system constructed today take best advantage of unanticipated future hardware advances. Metasystems software must also support complete site autonomy, as resource owners will not turn control of their resources (hosts, databases, devices, etc.) over to a dictatorial system. Legion is a metasystem designed to meet the challenges of managing and exploiting wide-area systems. The Legion virtual machine provides secure shared object and shared name spaces, application adjustable fault-tolerance, improved response time, and greater throughput. Legion tackles problems not solved by existing workstation-based parallel processing tools, such as fault-tolerance, wide-area parallel processing, interoperability, heterogeneity, security, efficient scheduling, and comprehensive resource management. This paper describes the Legion run-time architecture, focussing in particular on the critical issues of extensibility and site autonomy.

[1]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  The core Legion object model , 1996, Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing.

[2]  Message Passing Interface Forum.  MPI: A message - passing interface standard , 1994 .

[3]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  Metasystems: An Approach Combining Parallel Processing and Heterogeneous Distributed Computing Systems , 1994, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[4]  Anh Nguyen-Tuong,et al.  Exploiting data-flow for fault-tolerance in a wide-area parallel system , 1996, Proceedings 15th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems.

[5]  Ian T. Foster,et al.  Globus: a Metacomputing Infrastructure Toolkit , 1997, Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl..

[6]  Francine Berman,et al.  Application-Level Scheduling on Distributed Heterogeneous Networks , 1996, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing.

[7]  Luca Cardelli,et al.  A language with distributed scope , 1995, POPL '95.

[8]  William A. Wulf,et al.  A new model of security for distributed systems , 1996, NSPW '96.

[9]  M. van Steen,et al.  An Object Model for Flexible Distributed Systems , 1995 .

[10]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  Basic Fortran Support in Legion , 1998 .

[11]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  Portable run-time support for dynamic object-oriented parallel processing , 1996, TOCS.

[12]  Larry Carter,et al.  Distrbution and Abstract Types in Emerald , 1987, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[13]  M. van Steen,et al.  The Architectural Design of Globe: A Wide-Area Distributed System , 1997 .

[14]  Vaidy S. Sunderam,et al.  IceT: Distributed Computing and Java , 1997, Concurr. Pract. Exp..

[15]  Alexander Reinefeld,et al.  The MOL project: an open, extensible metacomputer , 1997, Proceedings Sixth Heterogeneous Computing Workshop (HCW'97).

[16]  Warren Smith,et al.  A directory service for configuring high-performance distributed computations , 1997, Proceedings. The Sixth IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (Cat. No.97TB100183).

[17]  Jr. Harold W. Lockhart.  OSF DCE: guide to developing distributed applications , 1994 .

[18]  John F. Karpovich.  Support for Object Placement in Wide-Area Heterogeneous Distributed Systems , 1996 .

[19]  Warren Smith,et al.  A Resource Management Architecture for Metacomputing Systems , 1998, JSSPP.

[20]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  Implementation of the Legion Library , 1996 .

[21]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  Legion-a view from 50,000 feet , 1996, Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing.

[22]  Henri E. Bal,et al.  Programming languages for distributed computing systems , 1989, CSUR.

[23]  Miron Livny,et al.  Condor-a hunter of idle workstations , 1988, [1988] Proceedings. The 8th International Conference on Distributed.

[24]  Nian-Feng Tzeng,et al.  Distributing Hot-Spot Addressing in Large-Scale Multiprocessors , 1987, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[25]  Samuel T. Chanson,et al.  Distributed, object-based programming systems , 1991, CSUR.

[26]  David E. Culler,et al.  A case for NOW (networks of workstation) , 1995, PODC '95.

[27]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  The Legion vision of a worldwide virtual computer , 1997, Commun. ACM.

[28]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  Easy-to-use object-oriented parallel processing with Mentat , 1993, Computer.

[29]  James Arthur Kohl,et al.  HARNESS: Heterogeneous Adaptable Reconfigurable NEtworked SystemS , 1998, Proceedings. The Seventh International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (Cat. No.98TB100244).

[30]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  Enabling Flexibility in the Legion Run-Time Library , 1997, PDPTA.