Automated Deployment Support for Parallel Distributed Computing

Heterogeneous distributed computing platforms continue to require substantial effort in terms of software installation and management for efficient use, often necessitating manual intervention by resource providers and end-users. In this paper we propose a novel model of resource sharing that is a viable alternative to that commonly adopted in the grid community. Our model shifts the resource virtualization and aggregation responsibilities to software at the client side, taking these burdens away from resource providers. Following this model, we have designed the Zero-Force MPI toolkit that automates installation, run, and post-processing stages of HPC applications, thus allowing application scientists to focus on using computational resources instead of managing them. Through the provided console, MPI can be soft-installed across a set of distributed resources with just a few commands. The prototype implementation of the ZF-MPI toolkit is based on FT-MPI. To evaluate the toolkit, we conducted experiments with deploying and executing the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. Results demonstrate that the run-not-install approach exemplified by ZF-MPI is effective and may substantially increase productivity of application execution