Lilith: A scalable secure tool for massively parallel distributed computing

Changes in high performance computing have necessitated the ability to utilize and interrogate potentially many thousands of processors. The ASCI (Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative) program conducted by the United States Department of Energy, for example, envisions thousands of distinct operating systems connected by low-latency gigabit-per-second networks. In addition multiple systems of this kind will be linked via high-capacity networks with latencies as low as the speed of light will allow. Code which spans systems of this sort must be scalable; yet constructing such code whether for applications, debugging, or maintenance is an unsolved problem. Lilith is a research software platform that attempts to answer these questions with an end toward meeting these needs. Presently, Lilith exists as a test-bed, written in Java, for various spanning algorithms and security schemes. The test-bed software has, and enforces, hooks allowing implementation and testing of various security schemes

A visualization tool for parallel and distributed computing using the Lilith framework

The authors present a visualization tool for the monitoring and debugging of codes run in a parallel and distributed computing environment, called Lilith Lights. This tool can be used both for debugging parallel codes as well as for resource management of clusters. It was developed under Lilith, a framework for creating scalable software tools for distributed computing. The use of Lilith provides scalable, non-invasive debugging, as opposed to other commonly used software debugging and visualization tools. Furthermore, by implementing the visualization tool in software rather than in hardware (as available on some MPPs), Lilith Lights is easily transferable to other machines, and well adapted for use on distributed clusters of machines. The information provided in a clustered environment can further be used for resource management of the cluster. In this paper, they introduce Lilith Lights, discussing its use on the Computational Plant cluster at Sandia National Laboratories, show its design and development under the Lilith framework, and present metrics for resource use and performance