An adaptive, fault-tolerant implementation of BSP for java-based volunteer computing systems

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in Javabased volunteer computing systems, which aim to make it possible to build very large parallel computing networks very quickly by enabling users to join a parallel computation by simply visiting a web page and running a Java applet on a standard browser. A key research issue in implementing such systems is that of choosing an appropriate programming model. While traditional models such as MPI-like message-passing can and have been ported to Java-based systems, they are not generally well-suited to the heterogeneous and dynamic structure of volunteer computing systems, where nodes can join and leave a computation at any time. In this paper, we present an implementation of the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model, which provides programmers with familiar message-passing and remote memory primitives while remaining flexible enough to be used in dynamic environments. We show how we have implemented this model using the Bayanihan software framework to enable programmers to port the growing base of BSP-based parallel applications to Java while achieving adaptive parallelism and protection against both the random faults and intentional sabotage that are possible in volunteer computing systems.