Wax: A Wide Area Computation System.
Abstract
This dissertation explores the use of machines connected to wide-area networks to provide the parallelism needed to work on large coarse-grain parallel applications. Large applications, such as circuit simulations, integer factoring, graphics applications, and NP- complete approximations, have potential coarse-grain parallelism that exceeds the parallel processing facilities at any single site. At the same time, the machines connected to wide- area networks represent a large and growing source of under-utilized computing power However, in order to transform the idle machines on a wide-area network into a large scale, wide-area distributed computing system, a number of problems need to be addressed: latency, failure, security, process management, scale, and system administration. This dissertation describes a prototype wide-area distributed computation system, called Wax, that has been built and used to explore solutions to these problems. Wax implements a programming model that takes into consideration the problems that exist in distributed computing environments, particularly wide-area ones. The key differences from traditional parallel programming models are a reduced global consistency guarantee, the explicit incorporation of failure into the model, and reduced access to the local execution machine. The first two differences allow Wax to expose the effects of some these wide-area problems (failure, latency, scale) to the application programmer. The most appropriate solutions to these problems often require application-specific knowledge. The third difference allows Wax to incorporate mechanisms to protect the resources used to process applications from abuse by those applications.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1994
- Accession Number
- ADA292247
Entities
People
- Peter D. Stout
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University