The use of Java in the NetSolve project

The NetSolve project, underway at the University ofTennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, allows users to access computational resources, such as hardware and software, distributed across the network. Thanks to these resources, the user can easily perform scienti c computing tasks without having any computing resource installed on his/her computer. There are many research issues involved in the NetSolve system, including Internet computing, fault-tolerance, load balancing, user-interface design, computational servers, and virtual libraries. After providing an overview of the project in its latest development stage, this paper emphasizes two particular aspects of our work. First, we describe our computational server paradigm and how these servers implement virtual libraries. The computational server creation/update process is facilitated by aJava applet. Second, we describe a new graphical interface to NetSolve since a constant concern of the NetSolve project is to provide di erent interfaces for a large number of target users. This graphical interface has been written in Java aswell