Mark Claypool and David Finkel
Powerful, low-cost clusters of personal computers, such as Beowulf clusters, have fueled the potential for widespread distributed computation. While these Beowulf clusters typically have software that facilitates development of distributed applications, there is still a need for effective distributed computation that is transparent to the application programmer. This paper describes the design and development of the PANTS Application Node Transparency System (PANTS), which enables transparent distributed computation. PANTS employs a fault-tolerant communication architecture based on multicast communication that minimizes load on busy cluster nodes. PANTS runs on any modern distribution of Linux without requiring any kernel modifications.
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Kevin Dickson, Chuck Homic and S. Bryan Villamin. Putting PANTS on Linux: Transparent Load Sharing in a Beowulf Cluster, Major Qualifying Project MQP-DXF-9918, Spring 2000. (Advisors Mark Claypool and David Finkel)
James Nichols and Marc Lemaire. Performance Evaluation of Load Load Sharing Policies on a Beowulf Cluster. MQP-MLC-BW01, Spring 2002. (Advisor Mark Claypool) http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/mqp/pants-load/