PUB: Paderborn University BSP Library

The Paderborn University BSP (PUB) library is a powerful C-library for running parallel programs in the bulk-synchronous (BSP) fashion on diverse types of parallel machines - ranging from classic, monolithic parallel machines to PC clusters. Such a PC cluster may be heterogeneous with respect to both hardware and availability; especially, PUB is able to deal with continuously fluctuation computing power, so that parallel computations can be executed in a cheap way using only the idle-times of a Linux-based workstation cluster instead of a parallel machine. Each time the availability of a PC changes during the execution of a parallel program, the schedule is optimized using process migrations. In contrast to other such approaches, our implementation does not consist of additional Linux kernel modules or patches and can thus be installed and used without admin priviledges, which means both an increase of security and an ease of maintenance at the same time.