Abstract
Harnessing the computational capabilities of a network of workstations promises to off-load work from overloaded supercomputers onto largely idle resources overnight. Several capabilities are needed to do this, including support for an architecture-independent parallel programming environment, task migration, automatic resource allocation, and fault tolerance. The Hector distributed run-time environment is designed to present these capabilities transparently to programmers. MPI programs can be run under this environment on homogeneous clusters with no modifications to their source code needed. The design of Hector, its internal structure, and several benchmarks and tests are presented. © 1998 IEEE.