[RiceCS]
DEPARTMENT
RESEARCHACADEMICS
PEOPLENEWS
[Rice]
Rice Computer Science
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Rice University
Department of Computer Science
presents

Andrew Grimshaw

University of Virginia

Legion - A View From 50,000 Feet

Abstract

Legion is a metasystem project at the University of Virginia designed to provide users with a transparent interface to resources in a wide-area system, both at the programming interface level as well as at the user level. Legion addresses issues such as parallelism, fault-tolerance, security, autonomy, heterogeneity, resource management, and access transparency in a multi-language environment The Legion run-time system consists of a set of "core" Legion objects and a run-time library. Our objective when designing the Legion run-time library was to construct an extensible system that supports a wide variety of tools, languages and computation models (including parallel languages), and allows diverse security, fault-tolerance, replication, and resource management, and scheduling policies. We achieved our goals via a flexible object model, user-replaceable "system" components, and a "soft" layering scheme. In this talk I will begin with an overview of the Legion project, the system architecture, and the Legion philosophy. The remainder of the talk will address parallel processing in Legion. Legion supports parallel processing by: 1) providing interfaces to popular libraries such as PVM and MPI; 2) supporting the encapsulation (wrapping) of parallel components into objects; 3) supporting the Mentat programming language (MPL) - a parallel C++; and 4) by providing direct access for third party compiler and toolkit builders to RTL functions such as program graph support and invocation management. I will conclude with the status and project timelines.

Wednesday, October 8 @4p.m. in Duncan Hall 1064
Reception to follow in Duncan Hall 1049
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