Any C++ libraries to run a single program on multiple PC's (i.e. "use grid computing to run my app")

Question

I'm after a method of converting a single program to run on multiple computers on a network (think "grid computing").

I'm using MSVC 2007 and C++ (non-.NET).

The program I've written is ideally suited for parallel programming (its doing analysis of scientific data), so the more computers the better.

Answer 1

Firstly, this topic is covered here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2258332/distributed-computing-in-c

Secondly, a search for "C++ grid computing library", "grid computing for visual studio" and "C++ distributed computing library" returned the following:

• OpenMP+OpenMPI. OpenMP handles the running of single C++ program on multiple CPU cores within the same machine, OpenMPI handles the messaging between multiple machines. OpenMP+OpenMPI=grid computing.
• POP-C++, see http://gridgroup.hefr.ch/popc/.
• Xoreax Grid Engine, see http://www.xoreax.com/high_performance_grid_computing.htm. Xoreax focuses on speeding up builds of Visual Studio, but the Xoreax Grid Engine can also be applied to generic applications. Looking at http://www.xoreax.com/xge_xoreax_grid_engine.htm quotes, we see the quote "Once a task-set (a set of tasks for distribution along with their dependency definitions) is defined through one of the interfaces described below, it can be executed on any machine running an IncrediBuild Agent.". See the accompanying CodeGuru article at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/showcase/Xoreax-Grid.aspx
• Alchemi, see http://www.codeproject.com/KB/threads/alchemi.aspx.
• RightScale, see http://www.rightscale.com/pdf/Grid-Whitepaper-Technical.pdf. A quote from the examples section of this paper: "Pharmaceutical protein analysis: Several million protein compound comparisons were performed in less than a day – a task that would have taken over a week on the customer’s internal resources ..."

Answer 2

The classic answer for this would be MPI (Message Passing Interface). It requires a bit of work to get your program to work well with message passing, but the end result is that you can easily launch your executable across a cluster of machines that are running a MPI daemon.

There are several implementations. I've worked with MPICH, but I might consider doing this with Boost MPI (which didn't exist last time I was in the neighborhood).