Integrating High Performance Computing and Virtual Environments

High performance computing has become accepted as a tool that can be used to solve many large scale computational problems. Because of the complexity of the problems associated with high performance computing, visualization of the output of high performance computing applications has always been an important factor in providing a complete problem solving environment for the high performance computing user. As visualization technology advances, it is important to consider what impacts those advances will have on the integration of high performance computing and visualization. Virtual environments are the most recent, and arguably the most powerful, visualization environments in use today. In this paper we analyze the current state of the research of integrating visualization, and in particular virtual environments, with high performance computing. We also present a framework for implementing such an environment and report on the status of its implementation at the Australian National Un..