Efficient scheduling of MPI applications on networks of workstations

The availability of a large number of workstations connected through a network can represent an attractive option for high-performance computing for many applications. The message-passing interface (MPI) software environment is an effort from many organisations to define a de facto message-passing standard. In other words, the original specification was not designed as a comprehensive parallel programming environment and some researchers agree that the standard should be preserved as simple and clean as possible. Nevertheless, a software environment such as MPI should have somehow a scheduling mechanism for the effective submission of parallel applications on network of workstations. This paper presents an alternative lightweight approach called Selective-MPI (S-MPI), which was designed to enhance the efficiency of the scheduling of applications on an MPI implementation environment. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.