The Nimrod computational workbench: a case study in desktop metacomputing
- Griffith Univ., Brisbane, QLD (Australia)
- Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)
- Queensland Univ., St. Lucia, QLD (Australia)
The coordinated use of geographically distributed computers, or metacomputing, can in principle provide more accessible and cost- effective supercomputing than conventional high-performance systems. However, we lack evidence that metacomputing systems can be made easily usable, or that there exist large numbers of applications able to exploit metacomputing resources. In this paper, we present work that addresses both these concerns. The basis for this work is a system called Nimrod that provides a desktop problem-solving environment for parametric experiments. We describe how Nimrod has been extended to support the scheduling of computational resources located in a wide-area environment, and report on an experiment in which Nimrod was used to schedule a large parametric study across the Australian Internet. The experiment provided both new scientific results and insights into Nimrod capabilities. We relate the results of this experiment to lessons learned from the I-WAY distributed computing experiment, and draw conclusions as to how Nimrod and I-WAY- like computing environments should be developed to support desktop metacomputing.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Research, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-31109-ENG-38
- OSTI ID:
- 465696
- Report Number(s):
- ANL/MCS-P-594-0596; CONF-961104-9; ON: DE97003894
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Supercomputing `96, Pittsburgh, PA (United States), 18-22 Nov 1996; Other Information: PBD: [1996]
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Multimethod communication for high-performance metacomputing applications
Computation Directorate Annual Report 2003