Spaces: Support for Decoupled Communication in Wide-Area Parallel Applications

Wide-area distributed systems like computational grids are emergent infrastructures for high-performance parallel applications. On these systems, communication mechanisms have to deal with many issues, including: private networks, heterogeneity, dynamic resource availability, and transient link failures. To address this, we present pi-spaces, a shared space abstraction of typed pipe objects. These objects, called pi-channels, are asynchronous pipes that combine streaming and persistence for efficient communication while supporting spatial and temporal decoupling. This feature allows pi-channels to be written even in the absence (or failure) of the reader. In this paper, we present the design of pi-Space runtime system and provide some throughput evaluation results with our experimental prototype.