Gallop: The Benefits of Wide-Area Computing for Parallel Processing

Internet computing has emerged, as an attractive paradigm for many applications that require access to distributed resources such as telemedicine, collaboratories, and transaction systems. For applications that require high performance, the Internet is assumed to be inappropriate. However, it is possible to obtain high performance for parallel scientific applications in an Internet environment. A wide-area scheduling system called Gallop has been developed to exploit opportunities for high performance using remote Internet resources for these applications. This paper describes the Gallop architecture and scheduling model, and performance results obtained for three parallel applications. The initial results indicate that wide-area parallel processing can lead to better performance even with Internet technology, but that current Internet bandwidth is a major bottleneck for file and binary transfer. This overhead limits the class of suitable applications to those that are large-grained or that will be run multiple times to amortize the transfer cost.