A Programming Environment for Dynamic Resource Allocation and Data Distribution

Dynamic resource allocation, particularly in the form of processor partitioning and scheduling, is an important factor in achieving good utilization and high performance in multiprocessor systems. On existing systems, however, there is a lack of finer control of resources allocated to executing applications. Typically, an application allocates all the resources it needs before starting execution and keeps them through out its lifetime. To overcome these shortcomings, we are developing a Distributed Resource Management System (DRMS) for dynamic allocation of resources during the execution of applications. Under DRMS, applications and the system interact through well defined interfaces to control resource allocation. These interactions provide a means for applications to specify their resource requirements and for the system to manipulate resources allocated to competing jobs in the system. DRMS also provides the programming support necessary to create applications that can execute on time-variant processor partitions. We call these applications {\em reconfigurable}. Run-time program migration and data redistribution are performed automatically. In this paper, we describe the programming model, language extensions, and run-time support provided by DRMS to create reconfigurable applications. We also give an overview of the resource scheduling components of DRMS. We present preliminary performance results using application benchmarks on the first implementation of DRMS for the IBM SP2. Our performance results show that (i) the support for dynamic resource control has minimal side effects on the application performance, and (ii) the costs associated with the data redistributions and program restructuring to...

By: Jose E. Moreira, Vijay K. Naik and Ravi B. Konuru

Published in: RC20461 in 1996

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