MinEX: a latency-tolerant dynamic partitioner
The information power grid (IPG) being developed by NASA is designed to harness, the power of geographically distributed computers, databases, and human expertise, in order to solve large-scale realistic computational problems. This type of a metacomputing infrastructure is necessary to present a unified virtual machine to application developers that hides the intricacies of a highly heterogeneous environment and yet maintains adequate security. In this paper, we present a novel latency-tolerant partitioning scheme, called MinEX, that dynamically balances processor workloads while minimizing data movement and runtime communication, for applications that are executed in a parallel distributed fashion on the IPG. The number of IPG nodes, the number of processors per node, and the interconnect speeds are parameterized in a simulation experiment to derive conditions under which the IPG would be suitable for solving such applications. Experimental results demonstrate that MinEX is an effective load balancer for the IPG when the nodes are connected by a high-speed asynchronous interconnection network. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19