An architecture for reconfigurable iterative MPI applications in dynamic environments

With the proliferation of large scale dynamic execution environments such as grids, the need for providing efficient and scalable application adaptation strategies for long running parallel and distributed applications has emerged. Message passing interfaces have been initially designed with a traditional machine model in mind which assumes homogeneous and static environments. It is inevitable that long running message passing applications will require support for dynamic reconfiguration to maintain high performance under varying load conditions. In this paper we describe a framework that provides iterative MPI applications with reconfiguration capabilities. Our approach is based on integrating MPI applications with a middleware that supports process migration and large scale distributed application reconfiguration. We present our architecture for reconfiguring MPI applications, and verify our design with a heat diffusion application in a dynamic setting.