Preliminary study of a task farming API over the GridRPC framework

In this paper, a middleware suite, which provides a task farming API, is studied in use over the GridRPC standard, in order to reduce the complexity of developing task parallel applications for the grid. APIs are proposed and higher functionality in task scheduling and fault tolerance is implemented in the middleware, based on our past experiences with the Ninf-G. Through our study, it is revealed that the argument array API needs to provide a means to copy arguments for duplicated task assignment. Timing of data transfer in the non-blocking RPC and a method to retrieve execution information for each RPC are expected to be standardized in the GridRPC. By resolving these three issues in the GridRPC, our task farming API library, meeting application requirements, can be fully realized on multiple GridRPC systems, saving the way for other higher functional API libraries to be designed and implemented