The Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Distributed Computing Environment

this paper we present the Virtual Distributed Computing Environment (VDCE), a metacomputing environment currently being developed at Syracuse University. VDCE provides an efficient web-based approach for developing, evaluating and visualizing large-scale distributed applications that are based on predefined task libraries on diverse platforms. The VDCE task libraries relieve end-users of tedious task implementations and also support reusability. The VDCE software architecture is described in terms of three modules: a) the Application Editor, a user-friendly application development environment that generates the Application Flow Graph (AFG) of an application; b) the Application Scheduler, which provides an efficient task-to-resource mapping of AFG; and c) the VDCE Runtime System, which is responsible for running and managing application execution and for monitoring the VDCE resources. We present experimental results of an application execution on the VDCE prototype for evaluating the performance of different machine and network configurations. We also show how VDCE can be used as a problem-solving environment on which large-scale, network-centric applications can be developed by a novice programmer rather than by an expert in low-level details of parallel programming languages