Design and Implementation of a Service-integrated Session Layer for Efficient Message Passing in Grid Computing Environments

When running large parallel applications with demands for resources that exceed the capacity the local computing site offers, the deployment in a distributed grid environment may help to satisfy these demands. However, since such an environment is a heterogeneous system by nature, there are some drawbacks that, if not taken into account, are limiting its applicability.First of all, one has to apply a meta-computing or Grid-enabled message-passing library in order to have the ability to route messages to remote sites as well as still being able to exploit fast site-local network facilities.Then, because the inter-site communication usually constitutes the system´s bottleneck, appropriate quality of service parameters should be provided and policed for those connections during the application´s execution. And finally, the parallel runtime environment of the distributed application should offer service interfaces in order to enable its interaction with Grid middleware. In this paper, we present a new library called ISI whose functionalities meet those requirements in terms of a session layer to be integrated into grid-enabled message-passing implementations.