A Framework for Dynamic Adaptation of Parallel Components

The emergence of dynamic execution environments such as Grids forces applications to take dynamicity into account. Whereas sudden resource disappearance can be handled thanks to fault-tolerance techniques, these approaches are usually not well suited when resource disappearance is announced in advance. However, this case occurs in particular for resource preemption due to resource sharing or maintenance operations. Similarly, fault-tolerance techniques commonly do not take into account resource appearance. On the other side, dynamic adaptation covers techniques for handling changes in the execution environment. This article presents a framework intended to help developers in the task of designing dynamically adaptable (but not fault-tolerant) components. This article puts the emphasis on an experimental evaluation of the cost of using such a framework.