Heterogeneous Message Passing and a Link to Resource Management

Parallel process communication and system resource management have been seen as two separate entities in parallel and distributed systems. This causes difficulties in the dynamic mapping of newly spawned processes, because the application has little or no information on the availability, the connectivity and the current work-load of the target system. As a consequence, process mappings are often sub-optimal, overloading resources on one system while other processors are idling. We present a software system named "PLUS" that provides • interprocess communication between different message passing models such as MPI, PVM and PARIX, and • access to resource management systems for optimal process mapping and task migration.PLUS is a light-weight, extensible and efficient communication interface. With only four commands, PLUS is almost transparent ot the application code. Our current implementation supports inter-process communication between PVM, MPI and PARIX, but it can be easily extended to other vendor-specific message passing libraries. As PLUS has been designed for wide area networks, much effort has been spent on portability and on optimizing the communication speed across internet and also intranet links.