Secure Remote Access to Numerical Software and Computational Hardware

In today's research environment, the chief platforms of development tend to be high-end workstations or supercomputers running some variant of the UNIX operating system. While these platforms are powerful and robust, non-computer scientists generally view them as cum-bersome and diÆcult to learn. This serves as part of the motivation that lead to the devel-opment of NetSolve, a system that allows for seamless access to computational software and hardware resources. Our approach is to implement a client/agent/server system that provides a uniform, intuitive interface to high-performance components. This article provides an introduction to the NetSolve software system that includes load balancing techniques, dynamic scheduling heuristics and fault tolerance. We discuss paral-lelization and other optimization strategies that we employ to improve performance. We then brie y discuss the use of NetSolve at the ARL MSRC and how our extensions to Netsolve us-ing Kerberos V5 allow current MSRC users transparent o site authentication, while allowing system adminstrators ne grained access control to the computational resources