Affiliations: Computer Science Department, University of California,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA. E-mail: {cappello, mourlouk}@cs.ucsb.edu
Abstract: CX, a network-based {c}omputational e{x}change, is presented. The
system's design integrates variations of ideas from other researchers, such as
work stealing, non-blocking tasks, eager scheduling, and space-based
coordination. The object-oriented API is simple, compact, and cleanly separates
application logic from the logic that supports interprocess communication and
fault tolerance. Computations, of course, run to completion in the presence of
computational hosts that join and leave the ongoing computation. Such hosts, or
producers, use task caching and prefetching to overlap computation with
interprocessor communication. To break a potential task server bottleneck, a
network of task servers is presented. Even though task servers are envisioned
as reliable, the self-organizing, scalable network of n
servers, described as a {\it sibling-connected height-balanced fat tree},
tolerates a sequence of n-1 server failures. Tasks are
distributed throughout the server network via a simple "diffusion" process. CX is intended as a test bed for research on automated silent
auctions, reputation services, authentication services, and bonding services.
CX also provides a test bed for algorithm research into network-based parallel
computation.
