Interfacing Interpreted and Compiled Languages to Support Applications on a Massively Parallel Network of Workstations (MP-NOW)

Abstract

Astronomers are increasingly using Massively Parallel Network of Workstations (MP-NOW) to address their most challenging computing problems. Fully exploiting these systems is made more difficult as more and more modeling and data analysis software is written in interpreted languages (such as IDL, MATLAB, and Mathematica) which do not lend themselves to parallel computing. We present a specific example of a very simple, but generic solution to this problem. Our example uses an interpreted language (IDL) to set up a calculation and then interfaces with a computational kernel written in a compiled language (C). The IDL code then calls the C code as an external library. We have added to the computational kernel an additional layer, which manages multiple copies of the kernel running on a MP-NOW and returns the results back to the interpreted layer. Our implementation uses The Next generation Taskbag (TNT) library developed at Sarnoff to provide an efficient means for implementing task parallelism. A test problem (taken from Astronomy) has been implemented on the Sarnoff Cyclone computer which consists of 160 heterogeneous nodes connected by a ``fat'' tree 100 Mb/s switched Ethernet running the RedHat Linux and FreeBSD operating systems. Our first results in this ongoing project have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach and produced speedups of greater than 50 on 60 processors.