Dynamite runs supercomputer applications on your work station cluster without you even noticing it

Almere, 23 November 98 Do you run your computing problems still in two dimensions because it would need a supercomputer to do it in 3-D? Do you know computer simulations that could help you, but you cannot afford the computers to run them on? Look around in your office. When you have a number of works stations around there, you already have your supercomputer: Dynamite turns the available computing power into one big parallel machine that can work on a large problem. Dynamite does this, the way you want it. It only uses power not used in some other way, quickly migrating from a machine when one of your designers needs it and it is the only software that dynamically redistributes the work over the machines when your application requires this. When you are an application provider, you can build Dynamite into your application providing your customers with supercomputer performance on their workstations.

Dynamite delivers automatic work-load balancing of PVM tasks in workstation cluster environments with dynamically changing load to applications. Dynamite monitors the load on the workstation cluster and, when necessary, dynamically redistributes tasks again to more efficiently use the hardware available. PVM is an industry standard for parallel processing, used in many European industrial applications.

Environments where Dynamite can be successfully used have a pool of some 10 workstations. This pool is used, for instance, to run one big parallel job with execution time of several hours and several smaller interactive jobs. The pool usually is under-utilised, because of an inadequate distribution of the workload, i.e. some processors get too much work and others too little. The imbalance can be internal to the parallel job or stem from outside the job, for instance because a user logs into a workstation, making it unavailable to run tasks of the parallel job. Dynamite provides a dynamic load balancing mechanism, and can increase the efficiency to over 90% under the right conditions

Dynamite runs on Unix systems only, as it is daemon based. From the Unix brands, in first instance, Sun Solaris and SGI Irix will be supported.

Because Linux is gaining market share, it will be investigated whether this will be supported too.

The most suited situation for the application of Dynamite is a single application on a network-of-workstations that would otherwise be under-utilised. There should not be much competition with other big jobs, and not too much interference with interactive work and smaller jobs. Preferably, Dynamite should be employed within a work group or small relatively isolated department or small company.

Application areas include CFD, finite element modelling, electro-magnetic simulation, etc.

Dynamite is an Esprit (23499) funded project. The partners are: ESI, UvA, PC2 and Genias Benelux. Within the project, UvA is developing the migration part, and PC2 and takes care of scheduling and monitoring software components. Dynamite is being built into PAM-Crash, the flagship software of ESI. Software company Genias Benelux, supports other vendors who build Dynamite into their applications and provides support to other users.

Check in at the Dynamite web site for more information.

Leslie Verweyveld