Restructuring Irregular Computations for Distributed Systems Using Mobile Agents

Abstract

One of the main problems arising when designing distributed High Performance programs, or when restructuring sequential programs for distributed systems, is workload unbalance. The Client-Server paradigm, which is usually adopted for distributed systems, is not flexible enough to implement effective dynamical workload balancing strategies. The Mobile Agent paradigm can increase the flexibility in the creation of distributed applications (and the restructuring of sequential applications for distributed systems), and can in particular provide with a robust framework for managing dynamical workload balancing. In this paper we show, through a case-study, how the restructuring of a sequential code implementing an irregular algorithm, with adoption of the mobile agent model, allows for yielding a load-balanced distributed version of the algorithm without completely rethinking its structure, and for reusing a great deal of the sequential code.