The future of high performance computing, as being currently foretold, will gravitate toward hundreds of thousands to million node machines, harnessing the computing power of billions of cores. While the hardware part is well covered, the software infrastructure at that scale is vague. However, no matter what the infrastructure will be, efficiently running parallel applications on such large machines will require optimized runtime environments that are scalable and resilient. More particularly, considering a future where Message Passing Interface (MPI) remains a major programming paradigm, the MPI implementations will have to seamlessly adapt to launching and managing large scale applications on resources several levels of magnitude larger than today. In this paper, we present a modified version of the Open MPI runtime that has been adapted towards a scalability goal. We evaluate the performance and compare it with two widely used runtime systems: the default version of Open MPI and MPICH2; using various underlying launching systems. The performance evaluation demonstrates a significant improvement over the state of the art. We also discuss the basic requirements for an exascale-ready parallel runtime.

Containment of application execution is a key security feature of operating systems. Without strong containment, an attacker who compromises one process may take control of the whole machine. Virtualization technology has been widely used in server systems to strongly isolate various applications or services in different virtual machines; its usage in desktop systems which are much more interactive (interactions with the user and between applications) is a challenging task. In this paper we describe SAFE-OS, a desktop operating system using virtualization technology. SAFE-OS provides a high level of isolation between processes while maintaining a standard user interface that abstracts the underlying complexity.

This article presents the design and building of DSL-Lab, a platform to experiment on distributed computing over broadband domestic Internet. Experimental platforms such as PlanetLab and Grid'5000 are promising methodological approaches to study distributed systems. However, both platforms focus on high-end service and network deployments only available on a restricted part of the Internet, leaving aside the possibility for researchers to experiment in conditions close to what is usually available with domestic connection to the Internet. DSL-Lab is a complementary approach to PlanetLab and Grid'5000 to experiment with distributed computing in an environment closer to how Internet appears, when applications are run on end-user PCs. DSL-Lab is a set of 40 low-power and low-noise nodes, which are hosted by participants, using the participants' xDSL or cable access to the Internet. The objective is to provide a validation and experimentation platform for new protocols, services, simulators and emulators for these systems. In this paper, we report on the software design (security, resources allocation, power management) as well as on the first experiments achieved.

Institutional grids consist of the aggregation of clusters belonging to different administrative domains to build a single parallel machine. To run an MPI application over an institutional grid, one has to address many challenges. One of the first problems to solve is the connectivity of the different nodes not belonging to the same administrative domain. Techniques based on communication relays, dynamic port opening, among others, have been proposed. In this work, we propose a set of Grid or Web Services to abstract this connectivity service, and we evaluate the performances of this new level of communication for establishing the connectivity of an MPI application over an experimental grid.

A long-term trend in high-performance computing is the increasing number of nodes in parallel computing platforms, which entails a higher failure probability. Fault tolerant programming environments should be used to guarantee the safe execution of critical applications. Research in fault tolerant MPI has led to the development of several fault tolerant MPI environments. Different approaches are being proposed using a variety of fault tolerant message passing protocols based on coordinated checkpointing or message logging. The most popular approach is with coordinated checkpointing. In the literature, two different concepts of coordinated checkpointing have been proposed: blocking and nonblocking. However they have never been compared quantitatively and their respective scalability remains unknown. The contribution of this paper is to provide the first comparison between these two approaches and a study of their scalability. We have implemented the two approaches within the MPICH environments and evaluate their performance using the NAS parallel benchmarks.