Infrastructure-Agnostic Programming and Interoperable Execution in Heterogeneous Grids

Abstract

In distributed environments, no matter the type of infrastructure (cluster, grid, cloud), portability of applications and interoperability are always a major concern. Such infrastructures have a high variety of characteristics, which brings a need for systems that abstract the application from the particular details of each infrastructure. In addition, managing parallelisation and distribution also complicates the work of the programmer. In that sense, this paper demonstrates how an e-Science application can be easily developed with the COMPSs programming model and then parallelised in heterogeneous grids with the COMPSs runtime. With COMPSs, programs are developed in a totally-sequential way, while the user is only responsible for specifying their tasks, i.e. computations to be spawned asynchronously to the available resources. The COMPSs runtime deals with parallelisation and infrastructure management, so that the application is portable and agnostic of the underlying infrastructure.