Xruntime: A Seamless Runtime Environment for High Performance Computing

Most HPC clusters are now based on an x86 architecture and Linux. In a Grid consisting of such clusters, users might think that a single executable file, a data set, and a single job script will work in all cluster environments. However, due to the lack of interoperability of MPI library implementations, file systems, and batch job systems, users need to be conscious of the runtime environments over the Grid. In order to overcome such differences, we propose a runtime environment called Xruntime consisting of the following three components. MPI-Adapter is middleware between the user program and an MPI implementation to make it possible to execute a single executable code on different MPI implementations. Catwalk is transparent file staging middleware that makes remote files accessed by an application visible as if they were located in the local system. Xruntime allows a user to use various clusters with single batch job script language the user is familiar with, without learning other batch job script languages used on other clusters.