An Enhanced Programming Model for Internet Based Cycle Stealing

摘要

Most current cycle stealing systems, especially those designed for the Internet require programmers to adopt the master-worker parallel programming paradigm. The master-worker paradigm is extremely limiting from an ion point of view as it requires a single master thread to expose all of the parallelism that the application hopes to exploit. In this paper we describe how we have extended our Internet cycle stealing system G2, to support more general parallel programming paradigms in which any task can create subtasks and in which tasks become self contained units of ion. The major problem addressed is how to allow tasks to wait for the results of their sub-tasks without tying up the resources of volunteer machines. By drawing a programming analogy with the asynchronous implementation of web services in ASP.NET we create a familiar yet powerful programming model for creating parallel programs using a variety of paradigms.