Overdrive Controllers for Distributed Scientific Computation PhD Candidacy Proposal Summary

Large distributed computer systems have been successfully employed to solve modern scientific problems that were previously untenable. Such systems create new parallel systems or bind existing resources together to harness the utility of the whole. With the advent of low cost hardware, high speed computers and sizable storage resources are pervasive and often notably underutilized. Modern middleware systems seek to congregate the potential of these existing systems into a powerful resource for scientific computation. A modern perspective on distributed computing studies the ability of systems to respond to heterogenous or low reliability environments, as well as the need to obtain high performance or guaranteed quality of service from these systems. In various forms such as Internet computing, desktop grids, and even “big iron” grids, this philosophy realizes the genuinely unpredictable nature of large scale computing projects. The development effort in this field takes two important forms: 1. it attempts to build aggregate systems that are more reliable than their underlying components, easier to utilize in concert, and effectively unified administratively; 2. it attempts to provide performance that is timely and predictable. In this proposal, the need to construct reliable, high performance storage from loosely trusted, low reliability components will be addressed. We will investigate methods to catalog and maintain large networks o