Supercomputing out of recycled garbage: preliminary experience with Piranha

In this paper we present a new system for making use of the cyles routinely wasted in local area networks. The Piranha system harnesses these cycles to run explicitly parallel programs. Programs written for Piranha are specializations of Linda master/worker programs [5]. We have used Piranha to run a number of production applications. We present a description of the Piranha prototype, briefly explain the Piranha programming methodology, and explore different types of Piranha algorithms. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number CCR-8657615 and NASA under grant number NGT-50719.

[1]  Tad Hogg,et al.  Spawn: A Distributed Computational Economy , 1992, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[2]  Robbert van Renesse,et al.  Amoeba A Distributed Operating System for the 1990 s Sape , 1990 .

[3]  John F. Shoch,et al.  The “worm” programs—early experience with a distributed computation , 1982, CACM.

[4]  Nicholas Carriero,et al.  How to write parallel programs - a first course , 1990 .

[5]  Fred Douglis,et al.  Transparent process migration: Design alternatives and the sprite implementation , 1991, Softw. Pract. Exp..

[6]  White,et al.  Solar neutrino data and their implications. , 1992, Physical review. D, Particles and fields.

[7]  Dennis Shasha,et al.  Persistant Linda: Linda + Transactions + Query Processing , 1991, Research Directions in High-Level Parallel Programming Languages.

[8]  James H. Morris,et al.  Multiprocessing in a network of workstations , 1989 .

[9]  David Gelernter,et al.  A CASE environment for parallel programming , 1992, [1992] Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Computer-Aided Software Engineering.

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

[11]  David R. Cheriton,et al.  The V distributed system , 1988, CACM.

[12]  Jonathan Walpole,et al.  Recovery with limited replay: fault-tolerant processes in Linda , 1990, Proceedings of the Second IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing 1990.

[13]  Andrew R. Cherenson,et al.  The Sprite network operating system , 1988, Computer.

[14]  Robert D. Bjornson.  Linda on distributed memory multiprocessors , 1993 .

[15]  Robert D. Silverman.  Massively distributed computing and factoring large integers , 1991, CACM.