|
|
February, 2004 |
|
|
||
|
Thank You Rob Bjornson Grid Computing at TurboWorx: The design of an effective parallel programming environment using Blackboard communication February 10, 2004 Download his zipped Powerpoint Presentation Rob Bjornson TurboWorx  High performance computing using large numbers of commodity PCs rather
than "supercomputers" has become increasing popular. In a session with
continuous Q&A, Rob pointed out that most clusters
are programmed
using low-level programming models, particularly message passing.
Such programs are
difficult to write and debug, and ignore important issues such as fault
tolerance and persistence. TurboWorx has developed an alternative programming model based on the "Blackboard" communication style of Yale's Linda. Processes communicate and synchronize by posting data in a publicly accessible space; other processes can search this space for notes of interest to them. In this model, interprocess data exists independent of the parallel processes, promoting the creation of parallel data structures. Rob discussed why this model is a powerful and effective alternative to message passing. He showed how his company has used this model to build a parallel computing environment (TurboHub and TurboBench) written almost entirely in Java that can execute complex programs efficiently and fault tolerantly. In addition, these programs are represented visually as dataflow graphs of reusable components. Rob concluded his talk with a live demo. Rob Bjornson is chief architect at TurboWorx, Inc, a software company located in Shelton CT and Burlington MA. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Yale University; his research focused on massive parallel computing. We gave these book door prizes courtesy Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall/PTR. 
 Reported by Terry McAuliffe |
