Adapting MPI to MapReduce PaaS Clouds: An Experiment in Cross-Paradigm Execution

One desired attribute of utility computing is the ability for any provider´s offering to meet any user´s requirement, but the variety of programming paradigms and platform models make this non-trivial. While higher specializations may be implemented on more generic layers, e.g. SaaS on PaaS, or PaaS on IaaS clouds, we attempt the inverse - deploying procedural message passing programs on a MapReduce platform. Although begun as an academic exercise, our experiences provide several insights into the feasibility of such a mapping and highlight some collateral benefits of deploying certain classes of MPI applications on MapReduce platforms. More generally, this potential for cross-paradigm execution marks a characteristic in the utility-like nature of cloud computing. Our approach is based on the concept of adapters, common in traditional utilities, to reconcile application requirements to platform facilities. Our design philosophy, middleware components, and results from a simple experiment are described.