Department of Computer Science at UH

University of Houston

Department of Computer Science

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Rakhi Anand

Will give a PhD defense of her dissertation


Efficient Communication for Replicated Processes in Volunteer Environments

Abstract

The availability of idle desktop computers represents an immense pool of unused computation and data storage resources. Volunteer computing projects such as BOINC or CONDOR allow scientists to utilize these resources to solve highly compute intensive and data intensive problems. However, as of today, it is not possible to execute parallel application that requires communication between the processes on these systems.

In this dissertation we propose to accomplish an efficient and scalable communication infrastructure for volatile compute environments, thus increasing the class of applications that can be executed in volunteer computing. In order to cope with the fundamental unreliability of these environments, a communication library deploying multiple copies of each application process is utilized. The dissertation analysis and tackles some of the main drawbacks of currently existing solutions, by developing new algorithms that allow a process to prioritize the replicas of its communication partners in order to optimize application performance. Furthermore, we present the architecture required for a light-weight run time environment, that can manage application processes in a distributed environment. The environment also provides the ability to place processes based on the communication characteristics of an application and the underlying network topology.

 

Date: Monday,April 2, 2012
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: 550-PGH

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Advisor: Dr. Edgar Gabriel