Section: Scientific Foundations

Network services for high demanding applications

Participants : Laurent Lefèvre, Paulo Gonçalves, Olivier Glück, Jean-Patrick Gelas, Matthieu Imbert, Mohammed Diouri, Ashley Chonka.

In a grid environment, two key points in the communication layers have to be considered in order to execute efficiently high performance applications: the heterogeneity of high-speed interconnections composing the grid and the Wide Area Network used to achieve inter-site communications. Our expertise to explore new mechanisms for improving the application performance when executed on the grid, relies on MPI applications. In particular, we gained insights on how to mutualize the performances of several interconnected high-speed networks and how to leverage this factorization to improve a single execution outcome of a MPI application. As one major difficulty dwells in an efficient and reliable communication between the heterogeneous agents of a grid environment, we developed solid skills in handling communication mechanisms that are resilient to heterogeneous and long-distance interconnections.