Communications of the ACM
NetSolve: a network server for solving computational science problems
Supercomputing '96 Proceedings of the 1996 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
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Based on the vision that the most important component of the next generation of scientific computing environments is not the High-Performance Computer (HPC) itself, but rather a distributed computing infrastructure of national and/or even global scale, it is the goal of the project Interactive Scientific Computing over Networks (ISCN) to conduct feasibility studies and to incrementally prototype a distributed object-oriented framework for scientific computing applications on distributed HPC systems. In the initial stage of the ISCN project, we have implemented a client-server framework supporting simple interactive selection of different remote HPC servers, configurations, and batch queues, interactive access to the running application, even when submitted to batch queues, interactive supervision/steering of the application and immediate visualization of results, and an interactive mechanism to manipulate output data visualization. The communication infrastructure used is the CORBA-based ILU software. The Java language is used to build a portable client that is executed on the scientist's desktop workstation or PC. As remote HPC servers we have used the NEC SX-4 and a Sun SPARCserver~1000. The scientific application selected to demonstrate our framework is the classical molecular dynamics application package DYMOKA written in FORTRAN. From the desktop the user can select any available machine to run DYMOKA and choose to launch it on demand or by submission to different job queues, using an interactive panel of the client. The user can interactively change the parameters in the input command file of DYMOKA and visualize intermediate results using the Java applet while the DYMOKA is still running on the HPC server.