NetSolve: a network-enabled solver; examples and users

The NetSolve project, underway at the University of Tennessee and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, allows users to access computational resources distributed across the network. These resources are embodied in computational servers and allow the user to easily perform scientific computing tasks without having any computing facility installed on his/her computer. The user access to the servers is facilitated by a variety of interfaces: application programming interfaces (APIs), textual interactive interfaces and graphical user interfaces (GUIs). There are many research issues involved in the NetSolve system including fault-tolerance, load balancing, user-interface design, computational servers and network-based computing. As the project matures several promising extensions and applications of NetSolve will emerge. The authors provide an overview of the project and examine some of the extensions being developed: an interface to the Condor system, can interface to the ScaLAPACK parallel library, a bridge with the Ninf system, and an integration of NetSolve and Image Vision.