Developing and evaluating abstractions for distributed supercomputing

To fully realize its potential, distributed supercomputing requires abstractions and environments facilitating development of efficient applications. In this paper we present PARDIS, a system which addresses this demand by providing support for interoperability of PARallel DIStributed applications. The design of PARDIS is based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Like CORBA, it provides interoperability between heterogeneous components by specifying their interfaces in a meta-language, the CORBA IDL, which can be translated into the language of interacting components. However, PARDIS extends the CORBA object model by introducing SPMD objects representing data-parallel computations. This extension allows us to build interactions involving data-parallel components, which exchange distributed data structures whose definitions are captured by distributed sequences. We present microbenchmark results which evaluate the performance potential of SPMD objects for data structures of diverse complexity and different network configurations. Based on these results, we conclude that while encapsulating the existence of multiple interactions SPMD objects also allow their efficient utilization, and therefore constitute a useful abstraction. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.