T. Vorakosit and P. Uthayopas (Thailand)
MPI, grid, cluster, NAT transparency, and routing algorithm
For large computational grid systems, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) is one of the most widely used programming models for distributed computing. However, current MPI implementations cannot utilize all computing nodes on a grid as a result of network configurations that effectively hide nodes behind a front end node or gateway. This work presents an approach called Hierarchical Virtual Clustering (HVC) that overcomes this problem in an efficient manner. The idea is to separate a grid into physical and hierarchically organized logical clusters, and to incorporate routing between these clusters at the MPI runtime library level. This approach has been implemented on an experimental grid-enabled runtime system called MPITH. Experiments have been conducted to compare the performance of MPITH with MPICH and found that a comparable speed can be obtained with a very little loss of performance. Hence, the approach presented here can be used to vastly increase grid computing resources available to MPI applications without impacting efficient utilization of those resources.
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