Abstract
Harness is a reconfigurable, heterogeneous distributed metacomputing framework for the dynamic configuration of distributed virtual machines, through the use of parallel “plug-in” software components. A parallel plug-in is a software module that exists as a synchronized collection of traditional plug-ins distributed across a parallel set of resources. As a follow-on to PVM, the Harness kernel provides a base set of services that plug-ins can use to dynamically define the behavior of the encompassing virtual machine. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation details of an efficient, multi-threaded Harness core framework, written in C. We discuss the rationale and details of the base kernel components - for communication, message handling, distributed control, groups, data tables, and plug-in maintenance and function execution - and how they can be used in the construction of highly dynamic distributed virtual machines.
This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Energy under grant DE-FC0299ER25396, and the Mathematics, Information and Computational Sciences Office, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, U. S. Department of Energy, under contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC.
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Elwasif, W.R., Bernholdt, D.E., Kohl, J.A., Geist, G.A. (2001). An Architecture for a Multi-threaded Harness Kernel. In: Cotronis, Y., Dongarra, J. (eds) Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. EuroPVM/MPI 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2131. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45417-9_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45417-9_21
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