Optimization Techniques for Implementing Parallel Skeletons in Grid Environments

Skeletons are common patterns of parallelism like, e.g., farm, pipeline that can be abstracted and offered to the application programmer as programming primitives. We describe the use and implementation of skeletons in a distributed grid environment, with the Java-based system Lithium as our reference implementation. Our main contribution are optimization techniques based on an asynchronous, optimized RMI interaction mechanism, which we integrated into the macro data flow (MDF) implementation technology of Lithium. We report initial experimental results that demonstrate the achieved improvements through the proposed optimizations on a simple grid testbed.