Section: Software

P2P-MPI

Participant : Stéphane Genaud.

P2P-MPI is an integrated middleware and communication library designed for large-scale applications deployment.

Many obstacles hinder the deployment of parallel applications on grids. One major obstacle is to find, among an heterogeneous, ever-changing and unstable set of resources, some reliable and adapted resources to execute a job request. P2P-MPI alleviates this task by proposing a peer-to-peer based platform in which available resources are dynamically discovered upon job requests, and by providing a fault-tolerant message-passing library for Java programs.

Communication library.

P2P-MPI provides an MPI -like implementation in Java, following the MPJ specification. Java has been chosen for its "run everywhere" feature, which has shown to be useful in grid environments.

Fault-tolerance.

The communication library implements fault-tolerance through replication of processes. A number of copies of each process may be asked to run simultaneously at runtime. So, contrarily to an MPI application that crashes as soon as any of its processes crash, a P2P-MPI using replication will be able to continue as long as at least one copy of each process is running.

Resource discovery.

Contrarily to most MPI implementations that rely on a static description of resources, P2P-MPI has adopted a peer-to-peer architecture to adapt to volatility of resources. A resource joins the P2P-MPI grid and becomes available to others when a simple user (no root privilege needed) starts a P2P-MPI peer. Thus, at each job request, the middleware handles a discovery of available resources, possibly guided by simple strategies indicated by the user, to satisfy the job needs.