GENESIS parallelism management system employing concurrent process-creation services

Clusters (of PCs or Workstations) are increasingly being chosen as platforms for the execution of parallel applications over traditional supercomputers owing to the excellent price-to-performance ratio held by clusters and the widespread availability of relatively inexpensive PCs/workstations and high-speed networks. Unfortunately, current operating systems and run-time environments do not provide satisfactory levels of support for parallel processing on clusters, forcing programmers to use third-party software that operates on top of existing network operating systems, which increases overheads and reduces flexibility. Creation of parallel processes suffers from poor performance because these processes are created in a sequential manner. This paper shows an original concurrent local and remote process-creation mechanism, a part of the GENESIS operating system that manages parallelism on clusters and, in particular, provides execution transparency and reduces the time required to initiate child processes of single program and multiple data (SPMD) parallel applications.