Stardust: An Environment for Parallel Programming on Networks of Heterogeneous Workstations

This paper describes Stardust, an environment for parallel programming on networks of heterogeneous machines. Stardust runs on distributed memory multicomputers and networks of workstations. Applications using Stardust can communicate both through message-passing and through distributed shared memory. Stardust includes a mechanism for application reconfiguration. This mechanism is used to balance the load of the machines hosting the application, as well as for tolerating machine restarts (anticipated or not). At reconfiguration time, application processes can migrate between heterogeneous machines and the number of application processes can vary (increase or decrease) depending on the available resources. Stardust is currently implemented on a heterogeneous system including an Intel Paragon running Mach/OSF1 and a set of Pentiums running Chorus/classiX. The paper details the design and implementation of Stardust, as well as its performance.