I/O in the Gardens non-dedicated cluster computing environment

Gardens is an integrated programming language and system designed to support parallel computing across non-dedicated cluster computers, in particular networks of PCs. To utilise non-dedicated machines, a program must adapt to those currently available. In Gardens this is realised by over decomposing a program into more tasks than processors, and migrating tasks to implement adaptation. Communication in Gardens is achieved via a lightweight form of remote method invocation. Furthermore, I/O may be efficiently achieved by the same mechanism. All that is required is to support stable tasks which are not migrated; these are effectively bound to resources such as filesystems. The main contribution of the paper is to show how I/O may be achieved in an adaptive system utilising task migration to harness the power of non-dedicated cluster computers