Thursday, February 23, 2012

Real-World Distributed Computer with Ibis

   Interest has grown in recent years, in establishing a means for world-wide computation. This is the motivation behind the development of computational clouds. The researchers at Vrije University in Amsterdam are looking for a solution in their software known as Ibis.
   Ibis employs an integrated system seeking to ease the process of both programming and distributing these computationally difficult applications. Ibis provides a communication library, the Ibis Portability Layer (IPL), and a deployment system. The deployment system consists of a GUI and a library for deploying applications implemented with the Java Grid Application Toolkit (JavaGAT). Ibis has been designed to be highly portable. It follows the paradigm that any application should be compiled once, then run everywhere on the distributed system. Using Java virtual machine technology, they are able to operate in most execute environments. This system is able to dynamically reassign tasks when a resource crashes, as well as redistribute workloads when new resources are added. All the many features of Ibis come with some level of computational overhead, but it is minimal when compared with the runtime of the tasks it is designed to handle.
   Ibis has already received use from notable institutions like INRIA, Jylab, and the Barcelona Super Computer Center. This project is of particular interest because despite the fact that a mobile phone could not operate the entirity of Ibis, it was able to utilize the multimedia servers to obtain a result from transmitting an image in 3 seconds. This software suite has the potential for use in many aspects of computing, and they are presently working on integrating with accelerators with GPU's that would open new avenues of development.

Bal, H.E.; Maassen, J.; van Nieuwpoort, R.V.; Drost, N.; Kemp, R.; van Kessel, T.; Palmer, N.; Wrzesińska, G.; Kielmann, T.; van Reeuwijk, K.; Seinstra, F.J.; Jacobs, C.J.H.; Verstoep, K.; , "Real-World Distributed Computer with Ibis," Computer , vol.43, no.8, pp.54-62, Aug. 2010
doi: 10.1109/MC.2010.184
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5492667&isnumber=5551033

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