A WEB-centric Approach to Distributed High Performance Computing.

Jeremy Cook

Recent trends in High Performance Computing (HPC) tend towards use of HPC resources in a distributed fashion. At the same time users of HPC resources are often most interested in solving computational problems rather than program development, debugging and building of infrastructures in order to solve their particular computational problem.

We report on a framework for integration of applications. Our framework - Integrated Component Environment (ICE) - is designed to allow integration of arbitary computational tasks in a distributed network. The Java programming language and standards such as CORBA and HTML are used to solve problems of portability and communication between modules.

Our framework allows the engineer to seamlessly integrate a number of applications running on different computer hosts, and link them together using process management software, to produce a single virtual application.

ICE is still under development, but is already applied in one project - Frontier - as the main harness for Computational Design Optimisation problems.

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