The influence of concurrent process duplication on the performance of parallel applications executing on COWs

The benefits gained from utilising Clusters of Workstations (COWs) as architectures for parallel processing are well known with such systems being a common sight throughout many organisations. COWs are able to present users and application programmers with a considerable computational resource for a relatively low cost. Unfortunately, the software currently used to support the application programmer in the development and execution of their parallel programs is often limited and lacks transparency. The initialisation stage of a parallel program can prove critical in obtaining good performance and engaging programmers, especially as the number of parallel processes increases. The focus of this paper is to present a unique process instantiation service that allows a set of parallel child processes to be concurrently duplicated across a COW through the use of group process migration and group communication services. The importance and impact that this process duplication service has on some common parallel applications is presented and detailed