Integrating computing resources on multiple grid-enabled job scheduling systems through a grid RPC system

We present a framework for a parallel programming model by remote procedure calls, which bridge large-scale computing resource pools managed by multiple Grid-enabled job scheduling systems. With this system, the user can exploit not only remote servers and clusters, but also the computing resources provided by Grid-enabled job scheduling systems located on different sites. This framework requires a Grid remote procedure call (RPC) system to decouple the computation in a remote node from the Grid RPC mechanism and uses document-based communication rather than connection-based communication. We implemented the proposed framework as an extension of the OmniRPC system, which is a Grid RPC system for parallel programming. We designed a general interface to easily adapt the OmniRPC system to various Grid-enabled job scheduling systems, including XtremWeb, CyberGRIP, Condor and Grid Engine. We show the preliminary performance of these implementations using a phylogenetic application. We found that the proposed system can achieve approximately the same performance as OmniRPC and can handle interruptions in worker programs on remote nodes.