Matthias Brune

A resource description environment for distributed computing systems

RSD (Resource and Service Description) is a software architecture for specifying, registering and accessing resources and services in complex heterogeneous computing environments. It has three major components: a graphical resource editor, a compiler system for translating textual specifications, and an application programming interface. In this paper we focus on the language definition and the compiler system that generates portable data objects for registering and accessing distributed resources. We also present the mechanism used by RSD to maintain information on the status of dynamic resources such as CPU load or network bandwidth. RSD is a purely descriptive tool that provides up-to-date information on system resources. Other tools, like resource brokers, mappers or job migrators, build on it.

RSD — Resource and Service Description

RSD (Resource and Service Description) is a scheme for specifying resources and services in complex heterogeneous computing systems and metacomputing environments. At the system administrator level, RSD is used to specify the available system components, such as the number of nodes, their interconnection topology, CPU speeds, and available software packages. At the user level, a GUI provides a comfortable, high-level interface for specifying system requests. A textual editor can be used for defining repetitive and recursive structures. This gives service providers the necessary flexibility for fine-grained specification of system topologies, interconnection networks, system and software dependent properties. All these representations are mapped onto a single, coherent internal object-oriented resource representation.

A Lightweight Communication Interface for Parallel Programming Environments

We present a small, extensible software interface for the communication between different parallel programming models. With only four new commands our PLUS communication interface can be easily integrated into existing parallel codes, allowing tasks to transparently communicate from, e.g., PVM to MPI and PARIX, or any other parallel programming model.

Specifying resources and services in metacomputing environments

With a steadily increasing number of services, metacomputing is now gaining importance in science and industry. Virtual organizations, autonomous agents, mobile computing services, and high-performance client–server applications are among the many examples of metacomputing services. For all of them, resource description plays a major role in organizing access, use, and administration of the computing components and software services. We present a generic Resource and Service Description (RSD) for specifying the hardware and software components of (meta-) computing environments. Its graphical interface allows metacomputer users to specify their resource requests. Its textual counterpart gives service providers the necessary flexibility to specify topology and properties of the available system and software resources. Finally, its internal object-oriented representation is used to link different resource management systems and service tools. With these three representations, our generic RSD approach is a key component for building metacomputer environments.

Resource management for high-performance PC clusters

With the recent availability of cost-effective network cards for the PCI bus, researchers have been tempted to build up large compute clusters with standard PCs. Many of them are operated with workstation cluster management software in high-throughput or single user mode.

Multi-User System Management on SCI Clusters

The growing maturity of hardware and software components has tempted researchers to build very large SCI clusters with several hundred processors that are operated as high-performance compute servers in multi-user mode.