REVENTS: Facilitating event-driven distributed HPC applications

Abstract

Modern scientific applications that need to share geographically scattered resources and dynamically adapt to changes in the environment pose challenges to traditional parallel and distributed programming paradigms. Distributed component frameworks attempt to address the demands of contemporary HPC applications by enabling coarse-grained decomposition and loose coupling. Nonetheless, components usually communicate via synchronous RPC, which is not suitable for interactive applications. This paper introduces a novel distributed event notification system, called REVENTS, which enables both synchronous and decentralized asynchronous component interactions. The REVENTS system is based on a topic-list publisher-subscriber model. It integrates and enhances common technologies for messaging, events, and group communication. The article introduces the REVENTS API, its reference implementation, and its application in the H2O metacomputing framework. Presented experimental results confirm REVENTS' usability in distributed HPC scenarios. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.