Computing over Networks: An Illustrated Example

With the advances in high-speed networking, partitioning applications over a group of computer systems is becoming an attractive way of exploiting parallelism. Programming general multicomputers is however very challenging: nodes are typically heterogeneous and shared with other users, making the availability of computing cycles on the nodes and communication bandwidth on the network unpredictable, This environment often requires users to use a programming model based on dynamic load balancing. In this paper, we use an flow field generation application to look at the problems that come up in a network environment. We use BEE, a monitoring system that allows programmers to interactively monitor their application, to show the behavior of the program under different conditions.