An Architecture to Support Collaborative Distributed Heterogeneous Computing Applications

Distributed heterogeneous computing is being increasingly applied to a variety of large size computational problems. Such computations generally consist of multiple heterogeneous modules interacting with each other to solve the problem at hand. The traditional way of integrating these modules and optimizing them for the overall design is a long and tedious process (typically taking several weeks). Recently, there has been some effort to design and prototype such systems [7,6,8]. However, these systems either are not web-based or lack a collaborative environment. The increasing use of Web technology for Internet and Intranet applications is making the web an attractive framework for solving distributed applications, least of all because the interface can be made platform independent. In this paper, we describe the design of the Collaborative Distributed Computing Environment, CDCE, and the JAVADC prototype we implemented. CDCE is an environment to design, execute, monitor, and control a distributed heterogeneous computing application with the following features: (i) it will allow collaborative design and control, (ii) it is easy to access, (iii) it is easy to use, (iv) it will work on heterogeneous platforms, and (v) it will be flexible to adapt to different scenarios. JAVADC - JAVA for Distributed Computing, is our first prototype which supports a user in one Internet domain who wants to configure a parallel environment on a specific High Performance Cluster, HPC, in another domain, run an application (which resides in yet another domain), and monitor its progress. All the machines involved in this process are of a different platform. We have successfully run scientific computations, launched from a PC in the odu.edu domain with all files being located in that domain, run the computation on the HPC in the icase.edu domain and monitored the results on the PC. We did not observe any significant performance degradation due to the JAVA server, client communication and execution. design and control, (ii) it is easy to access, (iii) it is easy to use, (iv) it will work on heterogeneous platforms, and (v) it will be flexible to adapt to different scenarios. JAVADC - JAVA for Distributed Computing, is our first prototype which supports a user in one Internet domain who wants to configure a parallel environment on a specific High Performance Cluster, HPC, in another domain, run an application (which resides in yet another domain), and monitor its progress. All the machines involved in this process are of a different platform. We have successfully run scientific computations, launched from a PC in the odu.edu domain with all files being located in that domain, run the computation on the HPC in the icase.edu domain and monitored the results on the PC. We did not observe any significant performance degradation due to the JAVA server, client communication and execution.