Abstract: This paper describes Stardust, an environment for parallel programming on networks of heterogeneous machines. Stardust runs on distributed memory multicomputers and networks of workstations. Applications using Stardust can communicate both through message-passing and distributed shared memory. Stardust includes a mechanism for application migration and reconfiguration. This mechanism is used for balancing the load of the machines hosting the application, as well as for tolerating machine restarts (anticipated or not). Stardust is currently implemented on an heterogeneous system including an Intel Paragon running Paragon-OSF/1 and a set of Pentiums running Chorus/classiX. The paper details the design and implementation of Stardust, as well as its performance.

Keywords: Parallel programming, distributed shared memory, heterogeneity, workstations clusters, checkpointing, load balancing.