A Problem Solving Environment for Network Computing

The current advances in high-speed networks and WWW technologies have made network computing a cost-effective high performance computing environment. New software development models and problem solving environments must be developed to utilize the network computing environment efficiently. In this paper we present Virtual Distributed Computing Environment (VDCE), which provides a problem solving environment for high-performance distributed computing over wide-area networks. VDCE enables scientists to develop distributed applications without knowing the detailed architecture of the underlying resources. VDCE provides well-defined library functions that relieve end users from tedious task implementations and it supports software reusability. The VDCE software architecture consists of two modules: Application Editor, and VDCE Runtime System. Application Editor is a Web-based graphical user interface that helps user to develop network applications and specifies the computing and communication properties of each task within the applications. The VDCE Runtime System schedules the individual tasks of the application to the best available resources, runs, and manages the application execution on the assigned resources. We also present how VDCE can be used as a problem solving environment and how the users can experiment and evaluate the performance of their applications for different VDCE hardware and/or software configurations