FULLY BUZZWORD COMPLIANT

http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/rcihpccoct98/rcinpacpaperoct98.html

In this paper, we describe an approach to high performance computing which makes extensive use of commodity technologies. In particular, we exploit new Web technolgies such as XML, CORBA and COM based distributed objects and Java. The use of commodity hardware (workstation and PC based MPP's) and operating systems (UNIX, Linux and Windows NT) is relatively well established. We propose extending this strategy to the programming and runtime environments supporting developers and users of both parallel computers and large scale distributed systems. We suggest that this will allow one to build systems that combine the functionality and attractive user environments of modern enterprise systems with delivery of high performance in those application components that need it. Critical to our strategy is the observation that HPCC applications are very complex but typically only require high performance in parts of the problem. These parts are dominant when measured in terms of compute cycles or data-points but often a modest part of the problem if measured in terms of lines of code or other measures of implementation effort. Thus rather than building such systems heroically from scratch, we suggest starting with a modest performance but user friendly system and then selectively enhancing performance when needed. In particular, we view the emergent generation of distributed object and component technologies as crucial for encapsulating performance critical software in the form of reusable plug-and play modules. We review here commodity approaches to distributed objects by four major stakeholders: Java by Sun Microsystems, CORBA by Object Management Group, COM by Microsoft and XML by the World-Wide Web Consortium. Next, we formulate our suggested integration framework called Pragmatic Object Web in which we try to mix-and-match the best of Java, CORBA, COM and XML and to build a practical commodity based middleware and front-ends for today's high performance computing backends. Finally, we illustrate our approach on a few selected application domains such as WebHLA for Modeling and Simulation and Java Grande for Scientific and Engineering Computing.

2.4.3 Visual Metacomputing



The growing heterogeneous collection of components, developed by the Web / Commodity computing community, offers already now a powerful and continuously growing computational infrastructure of what we called DcciS - Distributed commodity computing and information System. However, due to the vast volume and multi-language multi-platform heterogeneity of such a repository, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to make the full use of the available power of this software. In our POW approach, we provide an efficient integration framework for several major software trends but the programmatic access at the POW middleware is still complex as it requires programming skills in several languages (C++, Java, XML) and distributed computing models (CORBA, RMI, DCOM). For the end users, integrators and rapid prototype developers, a more efficient approach can be offered via the visual programming techniques. Visual authoring frameworks such as Visual Basic for Windows GUI development, AVS/Khoros for scientific visualization, or UML based Rational Rose for Object Oriented Analysis and Design are successfully tested and enjoy growing popularity in the respective developer communities. Several visual authoring products appeared also recently on the Java developers market including Visual Studio, Visual Age for Java, JBuilder or J++.



HPC community has also explored visual programming in terms of custom prototypes such as HeNCE or CODE, or adaptation of commodity systems such as AVS. At NPAC, we are developing a Web based visual programming environment called WebFlow. Our current prototype summarized below and discussed in detail in Section 5.7 follows the 100% Java model and is currently being extended towards other POW components (CORBA, COM, WOM) as discussed in Sections 5.8 and 5.9.