Campus-wide computing: Early results using Legion at the University of Virginia

The Legion project at the University of Virginia is an architecture for designing and building system services that provide the illusion of a single virtual machine to users, a virtual machine that provides both improved response time via parallel execution and greater throughput. Legion targets workstation clusters and larger wide area assemblies of workstations, supercomputers, and parallel supercomputers. The authors have built a working Legion prototype called the Campus-Wide Virtual Computer (CWVC). The CWVC extends an existing object-oriented parallel processing system by aggressively incorporating lessons learned in the last 20 years of heterogeneous distributed computing. In this paper, the authors describe the challenges that they overcame to realize a working CWVC and characterize the performance of a production biochemistry application.