Parallel Programming Framework for Heterogeneous Computing Environment with Xen Virtualization

We propose an unified parallel programming framework which supports both heterogeneity and fault tolerance in MPI programs on a variety of parallel computing platforms. This paper is mainly dedicated to heterogeneity support in our framework. In our framework, a variety of parallel and sequential jobs submitted by multiple users are optimally scheduled on heterogeneous parallel computing environment. To balance the loads among the nodes on such heterogeneous computing environments, some of the parallel processes should be transferred between the nodes. We adopted the migration facility provided by Xen virtualization to realize a load balancing system where an MPI process running on a Xen virtual machine is migrated between the nodes. We confirmed that the protype system offers efficient load balancing facilities for heterogeneous computing environment with low overhead incurred by Xen virtualization.