Message passing over windows-based desktop grids

Message Passing is a popular mechanism used to enable inter-process communication in parallel and distributed computing. Many complex scientific and engineering applications that are executed on clusters have been developed based on this communication model. Due to the huge amount of computing power being wasted in desktops, there is an increasing interest in using these computers to execute complex applications. However, most of the current middleware systems are aimed at executing only embarrassingly parallel applications, i.e. with no inter-process communication. Moreover, most existing middleware systems are based on Linux. Nevertheless, it is well-known that the desktop machines in the world are predominantly based on the Windows operating system. Hence, in this work we present the design implementation and evaluation performance of a Windows-based implementation of two message passing models, Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP), over the Alchemi Grid computing framework.