A MECHANISM TO DETECT WIRELESS NETWORK FAILURES FOR MPI PROGRAMS * E. M. Mac´ ıas, A. Su´arez Grupo de Arquitectura y Concurrencia (G.A.C.) Departamento de Ingenier´ ıaTelem´atica(U.L.P.G.C.) elsa@cic.teleco.ulpgc.es, alvaro@dit.ulpgc.es Abstract Recent advances in wireless communication technology are making Wire- less Local Area Networks (WLAN) an appealing vehicle for parallel and distributed network based computing. The features of the wireless phys- ical level lead new challenges when designing parallel applications. One important challenge is to guarantee the successful completion of the parallel program in presence of wireless link failures. A great concern in wireless communications is the efficient management of spurious dis- connections. In this paper we propose an extension of our library to provide transparent network failure detection for Master-Worker MPI parallel programs with or without dependencies among iterations and its execution in a LAN-WLAN infrastructure. Keywords: Network-based computing, wireless communication, network failures, MPI-2. 1. Introduction Nowadays there is a high deployment of 3G communication networks. In such networks it is combined wireless and wired physical communi- cation media to allow users the usage of communication networks at any space and time. In short distances a user may communicate using a portable computer with Radio Network Interface Card (RNIC) that implements the IEEE 802.x protocol family at 2, 11, 25 and in the near future 54 Mbps, reaching a proxy or Access Point node to connect the computer to a wired network, to other portable computers (with their corresponding RNIC) and even to Internet. * Research partially supported by Spanish CICYT under Contract: TIC2001-0956-C04-03. 1