Metacomputing in gigabit environments: Networks, tools, and applications

This article gives an overview over recent and current metacomputing activities of the Computing Centers at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, the GMD Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik and the University of Stuttgart. It starts with a discussion of the underlying network connections which are dedicated testbeds. A library that provides an MPI-API for metacomputing applications is presented, as well as a library that supports load-balancing and latency hiding. Finally, results from several applications ranging from tightly coupled homogeneous to loosely coupled heterogeneous metacomputing are presented