A WOS/sup TM/-based solution for high performance computing

Most of the development environments for high performance parallel applications require that all the computing modules and resources be known in advance. The execution environment must know where the different program modules will be executed, and must properly configure each computer involved in the execution. We describe how the Web Operating System (WOS/sup TM/) environment may be used to dynamically adjust the granularity of parallel programs, locate available computers to perform the computations and how these computers are dynamically configured. The WOS (P. Kropf et al., 2000) is a metacomputing environment suitable for supporting and managing distributed parallel processing on wide and local networks. Communication between WOS nodes is realized through a generic service protocol (WOSP) and a discovery/location protocol (WOSRP). WOSP may be versioned to support specialized services. The authors focus on the design of two such versions for parallel/distributed applications and high performance computing. These versions support the location and setup of computational nodes for these applications.