Abstract Programming tools that are simultaneously sustainable, highly functional, robust and easy to use have been hard to come by in the HPCC arena. This is partially due to the difficulty in developing sophisticated customized systems for what is a relatively small part of the worldwide computing enterprise. Thus, we have developed a new strategy – termed High Performance Commodity Computing (HPCC) [G. Fox, W. Furmanski, HPCC as high performance commodity computing, in: I. Foster, C. Kesselman (Eds.), Building National Grid, http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/HPcc/HPcc.html ] – which builds HPCC programming tools on top of the remarkable new software infrastructure being built for the commercial web and distributed object areas. We add high performance to commodity systems using multi-tier architecture with Globus metacomputing toolkit as the backend of a middle-tier of commodity web and object servers. We have demonstrated the fully functional prototype of WebFlow during Alliance’98 meeting.

We developed a platform independent, three-tier system, called WebFlow. The visual authoring tools implemented in the front end integrated with the middle tier network of servers based on the industry standards and following distributed object paradigm, facilitate seamless integration of commodity software components. We add high performance to commodity systems using GLOBUS metacomputing toolkit as the backend. We have explained these ideas in general before, and here for the first time we describe a fully operational example which is expected to be deployed in an NCSA Alliance Grand Challenge.

The requirements of grand challenge problems and the deployment of gigabit networks makes the network computing framework an attractive and cost effective computing environment with which to interconnect geographically distributed processing and storage resources. Our project, Virtual Distributed Computing Environment (VDCE), provides a problem-solving environment for high-performance distributed computing over wide area networks. VDCE delivers well-defined library functions that relieve end-users of tedious task implementations and also support reusability. In this paper we present the conceptual design of VDCE software architecture, which is defined in three modules: (a) the Application Editor, a user-friendly application development environment that generates the Application Flow Graph (AFG) of an application; (b) the Application Scheduler, which provides an efficient task-to-resource mapping of AFG; and (c) the VDCE Runtime System, which is responsible for running and managing application execution and monitoring the VDCE resources.

We present here recent work at NPAC aimed at developing WebFlow – a general purpose Web-based visual interactive programming environment for coarse grain distributed computing. We follow the 3-tier architecture with the central control and integration WebVM layer in tier-2, interacting with the visual graph editor applets in tier-1 (front-end) and the legacy systems in tier-3. WebVM is given by a mesh of Java Web servers such as Jeeves from JavaSoft or Jigsaw from MIT/W3C. All system control structures are implemented as URL-addressable servlets which enable Web browser-based authoring, monitoring, publication, documentation and software distribution tools for distributed computing. We view WebFlow/WEbVM as a promising programming paradigm and co-ordination model for the exploding volume of Web/Java software, and we illustrate it in a set of ongoing application development activities. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We discuss the role of Java and Web technologies for general simulation. We classify the classes of concurrency typical in problems and analyse separately the role of Java in user interfaces, coarse grain software integration and detailed computational kernels. We conclude that Java could become a major language for computational science, as it potentially offers good performance, excellent user interfaces and the advantages of object-oriented structure. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Discusses the emergent World Wide Web-based distributed environments for high-performance computing and communications (HPCC) on the National Information Infrastructure (NII) with the focus on Java as an enabling technology. We start with a review of the past, present and near-term future of the "Java phenomenon", exposed in the background of some related previous approaches towards a distributed interpretative virtual machine architecture. Next, we discuss the anticipated role of Java in building distributed Web-based computing environments. We outline an evolutionary path from the current Web technology "soup" towards "all-Java" systems and we illustrate this process in terms of the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) Web technology prototypes (WebVM, WebFlow, Bridge-based Collaboratory) and selected applications (CareWeb, 3D Visible Human).

Abstract MOVIE (Multitasking Object‐oriented Visual Interactive Environment) is a new software system for high‐performance distributed computing (HPDC), currently in the advanced design and implementation stage at Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC), Syracuse University. The MOVIE system is structured as a multiserver network of interpreters of the high‐level object‐oriented programming language MovieScript. MovieScript derives from PostScript and extends it in the C++ syntax‐based object‐oriented interpreted style towards 3D graphics, high‐performance computing and general‐purpose high‐level communication protocol for distributed and MIMD‐parallel computing. The paper describes the overall open systems‐based MOVIE design and itemizes currently implemented, developed and planned components of the system.

MOVIE (multitasking object-oriented visual interactive environment) is the new software system for high performance distributed computing (HDPC), currently in the advanced design and implementation stage at Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC), Syracuse University. MOVIE System is structured as a multiserver network of interpreters of high-level object-oriented programming language MovieScript. MovieScript derives from PostScript and extends it in the C++ syntax based object-oriented interpreted style towards 3D graphics, high performance computing and general purpose high level communication protocol for distributed and MIMD-parallel computing. The authors describe the overall open systems based MOVIE design and itemize currently implemented, developed and planned components of the system.>