An integrated graphical user interface for high performance distributed computing

It is very common that modern large-scale scientific applications employ multiple compute and storage resources in a heterogeneously distributed environment. Working effectively and efficiently in such an environment is one of the major concerns for designing meta-data management systems. The authors present an integrated graphical user interface (GUI) that makes the entire environment virtually an easy-to-use control platform for managing complex programs and their large datasets. To hide the I/O latency when the the user carries out interactive visualization, aggressive prefetching and caching techniques are employed in our GUI. The performance numbers show that the design of our Java GUI has achieved the goals of both high performance and ease-of-use.