Abstract
Workstation cluster computing recently has become an important and successful technique. The communication bottleneck limits this approach to small and medium sized configurations of up to 30 workstations for most applications. This paper demonstrates that for certain algorithms massively parallel cluster computing using thousands of workstations in the Internet is feasible. It describes structures for the coordination of a large number of geographically dispersed processes. The paper introduces Lola, a library supporting massively parallel computing in wide area networks, and provides an application example.
Research partially supported by Firma Siemens AG München and Schweizer Bundesamt für Konjunktur und Wirtschaftsförderung, grant numbers 2255.1 and 2554.1.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
R. D. Bjornson, Linda on Distributed Memory Multiprocessors. PhD Thesis and technical report YALEU/DCS/RR-931, University of Yale, november 1992.
R. Butler, E. Lusk, User's Guide to the p4 Parallel Programming System. Technical report, Argonne National Laboratory, august 1992.
C. H. Cap, Massively Parallel Computing in Wide Area Networks. Technical report, department of computer science, University of Zurich, 1993.
C. H. Cap, Architekturelle Entscheidungen zur Unterstützung parallelen Rechnens in Workstation Clustern und deren Realisierung in existenten Produkten. Proceedings 2. ITG/GI Workshop Workstations, Hagen 1993, VDE Verlag.
C. H. Cap and V. Strumpen, Efficient Parallel Computing in Distributed Workstation Environments. Parallel Computing, 19(11), 1993.
C. H. Cap and V. Strumpen, The Parform — A High Performance Parallel Platform for Efficient Computation in a Distributed Workstation Environment. Technical report IFI-TR 92.07 Technical report, department of computer science, University of Zurich, 1992.
C. H. Cap and V. Strumpen, Massively Parallel Computing in the Internet — Entry to the SuParCup'93. Department of computer science, University of Zurich, 1993. This entry won the first prize of the SuParCup93.
G. Geist and V. Sunderam. The PVM system: Supercomputer Level Concurrent Computation on a Heterogeneous Network of Workstations. Proceedings of the Sixth Distributed Memory Computing Conference, IEEE Press, 1991,258–261.
M. Griebel, W. Huber, T. Störtkuhl and C. Zenger, On the Parallel Solution of 3D PDEs on a Network of Workstations and on Vector Computers.
HPCwire, Comparing the Efficiency of molecular biology sequence-analysis computations. Electronic Newsletter HPCwire, topic 815, March 1, 1993. Further source: SDSC's Computational Science Advances.
R. J. Lipton, T. G. Marr and J. D. Welsh, Computational Approaches to Discovering Semantics in Molecular Biology. Proc. IEEE 77(7) 1989, pp. 1056–1060.
H. P. Lüthi, J. Almlöf, Network Supercomputing: A distributed-concurrent direct SCF scheme. Theoretica Chimica Acta 84, 1993, pp. 443–455.
C. D. Marsan, NSF pursues computing without walls. Federal Computer Week 6(35), 53, november 30, 1992.
H. Nakanishi, V. Rego and V. Sunderam, Superconcurrent Simulation of Polymer Chains on Heterogeneous Networks. Proceedings Supercomputer 92, Minneapolis, IEEE Press, 1992, 561–569.
W. Scott, P. Arbenz, S. Vogel and H. P. Lüthi, Network Supercomputing. EPFL Supercomputing Review, november 1991.
T. F. Smith, M. S. Waterman, Identification of Common Molecular Subsequences. Journal of Molecular Biology 147, 1981, pp. 195–197
C. Sprenger, Netzwerk-Computing. Diploma thesis, Institut für wissenschaftliches Rechnen, ETH Zurich, march 1992.
V. Strumpen, Parallel Molecular Sequence Analysis on Workstations in the Internet. Technical report, department of computer science, University of Zurich, 1993.
L. H. Turcotte, A Survey of Software Environments for Exploiting Networked Computing Resources. Technical report of the engineering research center for computational field simulation, june 1993.
R. A. Wagner and M. J. Fischer, The String to String Correction Problem. JACM 21(2) 1974, pp. 168–173.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cap, C.H. (1994). Massive parallelism with workstation clusters — challenge or nonsense?. In: Gentzsch, W., Harms, U. (eds) High-Performance Computing and Networking. HPCN-Europe 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 797. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57981-8_93
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57981-8_93
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-57981-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48408-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive