Project No.: 5003-051345 01.04.98 - 31.12.99 (second series)

Project leader: Dr. Karsten Decker, PD., CSCS, Centro Svizzero di Calcolo Scientifico ETHZ, Manno
e-mail: decker@cscs.ch

Name of project: Integration of in-house and national HPC resources into a distributed computing environment

Partners:
Dr. Michael Casey, Sulzer Innotec AG, Winterthur
Marc Ch. Aicher, CyberSonic Technologies, Belmont

Funding: Sfr 250,744.-

Summary:
The CSCS high-performance computer infrastructure is available as a service to users in private and state institutions for research and other purposes. The goal of the present project is to facilitate the use of high-performance computers which are not available in-house by providing access via an Intranet structure. This applies in particular to functions such as interactive remote control of the execution, monitoring, control and follow-up of applications in a heterogeneous distributed computer environment and the transparent integration of national high-performance computing resources in in-house Intranet-based resources.

For this purpose, a sequence of incrementally refined prototypes are being developed up to and including a coherent metacomputing environment.

The project features the following main scientific deliverables:

• Technical information and communication requirements, methods and techniques for the transparent integration of heterogeneous computer resources and networks in a unified distributed metacomputing environment;
• Evaluation of CORBA (Common Request Broker Architecture) for applications with high latency and transmission bandwith requirements;
• Detailed specifications of user and function requirements;
• Design and realization of generic and portable software components for applications management in metacomputing environments capable of working with one of the available resource management systems such as CODINE, Condor or LSF.

Cooperation:
Our business partners are CST (Cybersonic echnologies, Neftenbach) and Sulzer Innotec AG. CST will continuously evaluate the software from the software engineering point of view and tailor it to systems that are in use neither at CSCS nor at Innotec. Sulzer Innotec will draw up the requirements specifications and provide continuous user feedback. When finalized, the resulting software will be installed in the CODINE environment of GNEAIS Software GmbH.