TITLE: Automatic Node Selection for High Performance Applications 
       on Networks

AUTHORS:  Jaspal Subhlok, Peter Lieu and Bruce Lowekamp

A central problem in executing performance critical parallel and
distributed applications on shared networks is the selection of
computation nodes and communication paths for execution. Automatic
selection of nodes is complex as the best choice depends on the
application structure as well as the expected availability of
computation and communication resources. This paper presents a
solution to this problem for realistic application and network
scenarios.  A new algorithm to jointly analyze computation and
communication resources for different application demands is
introduced and a framework for automatic node selection is developed
on top of Remos, which is a query interface to network information.
The paper reports results from a set of applications, including
Airshed pollution modeling and magnetic resonance imaging, executing
on a high speed network testbed.  The results demonstrate that node
selection is effective in enhancing application performance in the
presence of computation load as well as network traffic. Under the
network conditions used for experiments, the increase in execution
time due to compute loads and network congestion was reduced by half
with node selection. The node selection algorithms developed in this
research are also applicable to dynamic migration of long running
jobs.