14331818
Web Service Grids: an evolutionary approach
The UK e-Science Programme is a £250M, 5 year initiative which has funded over 100 projects. These application-led projects are under-pinned by an emerging set of core middleware services that allow the coordinated, collaborative use of distributed resources. This set of middleware services runs on top of the research network and beneath the applications we call the ‘Grid’. Grid middleware is currently in transition from pre-Web Service versions to a new version based on Web Services. Unfortunately, only a very basic set of Web Services embodied in the Web Services Interoperability proposal, WS-I, are agreed by most IT companies. IBM and others have submitted proposals for Web Services for Grids - the Web Services ResourceFramework and Web Services Notification specifications - to the OASIS organisation for standardisation. This process could take up to 12 months from March 2004 and the specifications are subject to debate and potentially significant changes. Since several significant UK e-Science projects come to an end before the end of this process, the UK therefore needs to develop a strategy that will protect the UK’s investment in Grid middleware by informing the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute’s (OMII) roadmap and UK middleware repository in Southampton. This paper sets out an evolutionary roadmap that will allow us to capture generic middleware components from projects in a form that will facilitate migration or interoperability with the emerging Grid Web Services standards and with on-going OGSA developments. In this paper we therefore define a set of Web Services specifications - that we call ‘WS-I+’ to reflect the fact that this is a larger set than currently accepted by WS-I – that we believe will enable us to achieve the twin goals of capturing these components and facilitating migration to future standards. We believe that the extra Web Services specifications we have included in WS-I+ are both helpful in building e-Science Grids and likely to be widely accepted.
205693269
Parallel Computing Comes of Age: Supercomputer Level Parallel Computations at Caltech
Parallel supercomputers are now in regular use at Caltech for several major scientific calculations. We use this experience to abstract a set of lessons for applications, decomposition, performance, hardware and software. We consider hypercubes, transputer arrays and the SIMD Connection Machine CM-2 and AMT DAP. These are contrasted, where possible, with CRAY and other high performance conventional computers. Applications covered are lattice gauge theory, plasma physics, statistical and condensed matter physics, astronomical data analysis, quantum chemistry, graphics ray tracing, string dynamics, grain dynamics, astrophysical particle dynamics, computer chess and Kalman filters.
41515
Object serialization for marshalling data in a Java interface to MPI
Several Java bindings to Message Passing Interface (MPI) software have been developed recently. Message bu ers have usually been restricted to arrays with elements of primitive type. We discuss adoption of the Java object serialization model for marshalling general communication data in MPI-like APIs. This approach is compared with a Java transcription of the standard MPI derived datatype mechanism. We describe an implementation of the mpiJava interface to MPI that incorporates automatic object serialization. Benchmark results con rm that current JDK implementations of serialization are not fast enough for high performance messaging applications. Means of solving this problem are discussed, and benchmarks for greatly improved schemes are presented.
36068759
The virtual computing environment
A network of supercomputers and high-performance workstations appears to be the only reasonable way to provide adequate computing resources for the Grand Challenge problems of the next century. Such a collection of computers and supporting software environments is called a virtual computing environment (VCE). The paper describes the motivation and goals of the VCE project, followed by a description of the system. The paper concentrates on the runtime aspects of the VCE, and concludes with a discussion of a small prototype system that has been built using the Isis distributed toolkit.<<ETX>>
18120304
Interpreting the performance of HPF/Fortran 90D
We present a novel interpretive approach for accurate and cost effective performance prediction in a high performance computing environment, and describe the design of a source driven HPF/Fortran 90D performance prediction framework based on this approach. The performance prediction framework has been implemented as part of a HPF/Fortran 90D application development environment. A set of benchmarking kernels and application codes are used to validate the accuracy, utility, usability, and cost effectiveness of the performance prediction framework. The use of the framework for selecting appropriate compiler directives and for application performance debugging is demonstrated.<<ETX>>
15876147
Messaging Systems: Parallel Computing the Internet and the Grid
We contrast the requirements and performance of messaging systems in parallel and distributed systems emphasizing the importance of the five orders of magnitude difference in network hardware latencies in the two cases. We note the importance of messaging in Grid and Web service applications in building the integrated system and the architectural advantages of a message based compared to a connection based approach. We illustrate these points using the NaradaBrokering system and its application to Audio-Video conferencing.
5973548
Community Grids
We describe Community Grids built around Integration of technologies from the peer-to-peer and Grid fields. We focus on the implications of Web Service ideas built around powerful event services using uniform XML interfaces. We go through collaborative systems in detail showing how one can build an environment that can use either P2P approaches like JXTA or more conventional client-server models.
205219153
16S rRNA oligonucleotide catalog data base
We have developed a package of programs to create, maintain and manipulate a data base of 16S rRNA oligonucleotide catalog data. For the first time all the published catalog data is brought together in one place in a readily usable form. The package allows generation of dendrograms, facilitates searches for related oligonucleotides between catalogs, and allows construction of global and local dictionaries. Interactive capabilities allow for searches of the dictionary as well as an associated file of likely oligonucleotide families.