Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm,comp.parallel.mpi
From: dbatten@postoffice.ptd.com (Dean Batten)
Subject: Re: Interest in potential Load Balancing product?
Organization: ProLog - PenTeleData, Inc.
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 1995 20:28:17 GMT
Message-ID: <dbatten-1106951628170001@cs1-09.all.ptd.net>

In article <D9xCzK.Aqu@dmapub.dma.org>, davism@dmapub.dma.org (Martin
Davis Jr.) wrote:

> This is a survey posting to determine potential interest 
> in a product that we at SYSTRAN may develop.
> 
> The product's function would be to assist the programmer 
> in assigning the tasks of a parallel program in a load-balanced 
> manner to the constituent nodes of a workstation cluster.  
> The product would be designed to work in a standard message 
> passing environment such as PVM or MPI.  The programmer would 
> utilize a toolkit to allow him to "instrument" his parallel 
> program to collect the necessary performance information;  the 
> system would then produce recommendations as to the appropriate
> allocation of tasks to the workstations.  The recommendations 
> could be accessed via the toolkit and thus drive the assignment 
> of the tasks.  The key feature of the product would be its 
> ability to utilize the program's past performance and/or other 
> similar programs' past performance in producing the recommended 
> allocation of tasks.

This is probably not a very helpful comment, but I'll make it anyway: A
fancy static load balancer seems like it would be of limited use. A fancy
static load balancer with hooks so that it can use gathered data to also
do simple dynamic load balancing could be indispensable.

I am a PhD student, though--more likely to write a competing product than
buy yours. ;)

Dean Batten
dbatten@postoffice.ptd.net
Allentown, PA, USA

