WSPE: a peer-to-peer grid programming environment

• Published in: Concurrency and computation Vol. 21; no. 13; pp. 1709 - 1724
• Main Authors: Rosinha, Romulo B., Geyer, Cláudio F. R., Vargas, Patrícia Kayser
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 10-09-2009
• Subjects: grid computing; grid-unaware application; peer-to-peer; programming environment; work stealing
• ISSN: 1532-0626; 1532-0634
• DOI: 10.1002/cpe.1392

Grid programming environments are tools designed to isolate users from issues such as heterogeneity, scalability and adaptability, thus simplifying the use of a Grid infrastructure. This paper presents work stealing programming environment (WSPE), a Grid programming environment for Grid‐unaware applications. WSPE can be defined as a programming environment, since it is a software tool that presents both a programming model and an execution system. The WSPE consists of a simple programming interface and a fully decentralized runtime system following a peer‐to‐peer organization, both presented in this paper. It's runtime system employs a new scheduling mechanism, known as round stealing, inspired by the idea of work stealing. The main focus of our work is to research on methods to achieve efficient execution of parallel applications in a Grid computing infrastructure. By simulation, we show that our scheduling mechanism outperforms a more traditional mechanism in a Grid environment. We also demonstrate how an appropriate choice for a network overlay mechanism can further improve the execution efficiency. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.