High Performance Virtual Machines -- 1997 DARPA ITO Summary

PROJECT SUMMARY

DARPA Order Number E313

Contractor:

The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 801 South Wright Street Urbana, Illinois 61801

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

     Andrew A. Chien
     Department of Computer Science
     University of Illinois
     1304 West Springfield Avenue
     Urbana, Illinois 61801
     Phone: 217-333-6844
     Fax:  217-244-6500
     Email: achien@cs.uiuc.edu

Co-PI's

     Daniel A. Reed and David A. Padua
     Department of Computer Science/University of Illinois
     Email: reed@cs.uiuc.edu
     Email: padua@cs.uiuc.edu

Related Information

http://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/projects/hpvm.html

Objective

High Performance Virtual Machines (HPVMs) can increase the accessibility and delivered performance of distributed computational resources for high performance computing applications. Successful HPVM's will reduce the effort required to build efficient parallel applications on distributed resources, increase the performance delivered to those applications, and leverage parallel software tools from existing parallel systems to distributed environments.

Approach

The rapidly increasing performance of low-cost computing systems has produced a rich environment for desktop, distributed, and wide-area computing. However this wealth of computational resources has not been effectively harnessed for high performance computing. High Performance Virtual Machines (HPVMs) are a new technology which leverage the software tools and developed understanding of parallel computation on scalable parallel systems to exploit distributed computing resources. The objective to reduce the effort to build high performance applications on distributed systems.

High Performance Virtual Machines depend on building a uniform, portable abstraction -- a virtual machine -- with predictable, high performance characteristics. To successfully insulate application programs, a virtual machine must (1) deliver a large fraction of the underlying hardware performance, (2) virtualize resources to provide portability and to reduce the effort in building application programs, and (3) deliver predictable, high performance. The project is developing novel technology that leverages commodity components (hardware and software) to deliver high performance communication over cluster and wide area interconnects, predictable communication and computation in a dynamic resource environment, and uniform access to resources (e.g. files, mass storage, embedded sensors). The HPVM project involves not only the development of novel communication, scheduling, and resource management technologies, but also dissemination of a series of software release which embody these ideas.

1997 Accomplishments

Developed a high performance messaging layer and interface, Fast Messages 2.0, which efficiently delivers the hardware network performance (82 megabytes per second and 8 microseconds latency) to application programs. Fast Messages 2.0 is freely distributed, and its low overhead interface of this system can increase the effective bandwidth available to applications by 50-100x.

Developed a Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation atop the high performance Fast Messages 2.0 layer which efficiently deliver the underlying FM performance (82 megabytes per second and 8 microsecond latency). These layers are freely distributed, and enable message-passing supercomputing applications to be easily migrated between PC clusters and supercomputers.

Developed Shmem Put/Get, and Global Array application programming interfaces atop the high performance Fast Messages 2.0 layer which efficiently deliver the underlying FM performance (82 megabytes per second and 8 microsecond latency). These layers are freely distributed, and enable global address space programming on PC clusters with high performance.

High Performance Virtual Machines 1.0 Software release. This system includes high performance communication layers (Fast Messages, MPI, Shmem Put/Get, Global Arrays) and a portable graphical front end which together enable convenient high performance computing on clusters of PC's. The system operates on both Myrinet and traditional networks, and runs atop Windows NT.

FY 1998 Plans

The major objectives for the fiscal 1998 year for the High Performance Virtual Machines are:

Technology Transition

The project has produced numerous software releases of Fast Messages 2.0x, MPI-FM, and related software. These packages are widely disseminated and used. We have approximately 20 source code licensees (typically researchers) and have logged over 850 downloads from over 450 distinct users. These users come from Department of Defense laboratories, NASA, the U.S. national laboratories, as well as academic and corporate researchers from around the world. In numerous sites, FM-related software releases are being used for production computing. Fast Messages technology is being used in a range of DARPA, NSF, and NASA research projects too numerous to list. The details of available software elements are included below.

Prepared July 1997

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