OmniRPC: a grid RPC system for parallel programming in cluster and grid environment

Abstract

We have designed and implemented a Grid RPC system called OmniRPC, for parallel programming in cluster and grid environments. While OmniRPC inherits its API from Ninf, the programmer can use OpenMP for easy-to-use parallel programming because the API is designed to be thread-safe. To support typical master-worker grid applications such as a parametric execution, OmniRPC provides an automatic-initializable remote module to send and store data to a remote executable invoked in the remote host. Since it may accept several requests for subsequent calls by keeping the connection alive, the data set by the initialization is re-used, resulting in efficient execution by reducing the amount of communication. The OmniRPC system also supports a local environment with "rsh", a grid environment with Globus, and remote hosts with "ssh". Furthermore, the user can use the same program over OmniRPC for both clusters and grids because a typical grid resource is regarded simply as a cluster of clusters distributed geographically. For a cluster over a private network, an agent process running the server host functions as a proxy to relay communications between the client and the remote executables by multiplexing the communications into one connection to the client. This feature allows a single client to use a thousand of remote computing hosts.