Web Access to HARNESS: a Virtual Simulation Laboratory

In the recent years metacomputing systems have proved to be capable of coalescing computational power in the order of magnitude of supercomputers without requiring to acquire costly specialized hardware. In fact, they showed their capability to conglomerate heterogeneous computational nodes over a geographically distributed area and to allow creating high performance workbenches for computationally challenging applications. Among these systems, HARNESS presents the unique feature of being based on the principles of dynamic reconfigurability and extensible distributed virtual machines. Unfortunately, the original HARNESS system requires that all the nodes accessing the services are part of the virtual machine thus preventing thin-client access to virtual machine provided services. In this paper we describe how we developed an extension to the HARNESS system capable of allowing web-based access to virtual machines and how we used our system to create a virtual simulation laboratory