ISCN: towards a distributed scientific computing environment

Based on the vision that the most important component of the next generation of scientific computing environments is not the high-performance computer (HPC) itself, but rather a distributed computing infrastructure of national and/or even global scale, it is the goal of the project Interactive Scientific Computing over Networks (ISCN) to conduct feasibility studies and to incrementally prototype a distributed object-oriented framework for scientific computing applications on distributed HPC systems. In the initial stage of the ISCN project, we have implemented a client-server framework supporting simple interactive selection of different remote HPC servers, configurations, and batch queues, interactive access to the running application, even when submitted to batch queues, interactive supervision/steering of the application and immediate visualization of results, and an interactive mechanism to manipulate output data visualization. The communication infrastructure used is the CORBA-based ILU software. The Java language is used to build a portable client that is executed on the scientist's desktop workstation or PC. As remote HPC servers we have used the NEC SX-4 and a Sun SPARC-server 1000. The scientific application selected to demonstrate our framework is the classical molecular dynamics application package DYMOKA written in FORTRAN.