Supporting data management on cluster grids
Cluster grid computing is considered a promising alternative to grid computing, since it uses networked computing resources widely available within the so-called departmental organizations as high performance/ / cost ratio computing platforms. ePVM is an extension of the well-known PVM programming system, and has been purposely developed to run large-scale PVM applications on cluster grids spanning across multidomain, non-routable networks. To this end, ePVM has been also provided with a parallel file system that enables the enormous volumes of data usually generated by large-scale parallel applications to be managed and distributed among the multiple disks available within cluster grids. In particular, the parallel file system, called ePIOUS, is an optimized implementation of the PIOUS parallel file system under ePVM. The implementation has been developed taking into account the two-level physical network topology characterizing the cluster grids built by ePVM. Furthermore, in order not to penalize the application performance, ePIOUS has been also provided with a file caching service that is able to speed up file accesses across clusters.
cluster grids parallel file systems parallel computing