Running real applications on software DSMs

This paper introduces our experiences with some real applications on the home-based software DSM JIAJIA and discusses techniques of parallelizing a sequential program to run on software DSM. It categorizes parallel program segments into five patterns: single-process sequential, mutual-exclusive sequential, data-parallel, task-parallel, and common-parallel. The usage of each pattern is then discussed with the real applications as examples. With some guide from their owners, these programs are parallelized to the API of JIAJIA in a very short time. Satisfactory speed-ups are achieved for them on a cluster of eight Pentium II PCs connected by a 100 Mbps switched Ethernet. Our experiences imply that with the advances of software DSMs and network technologies, the time for pushing the software DSM into the parallel processing mainstream has come and efforts should be made by software DSM researchers to expand the application of software DSMs.