DHPC Talk DHPCT-010

Distributed Applications using Nexus

Derrick Tia

Archived: 21 December 1997

Seminar presented as part of the University of Adelaide Computer Science Department Honours Program Series on Thursday 30th October, 1997.

Abstract

The main objective of this project was to investigate the expressiveness and efficiency of the Nexus runtime system in the construction of wide area applications for distributed high performance computing. The Nexus runtime system provides protocol selection and interoperability mechanisms that are essential in a heterogeneous environment. It also provides a portable, high-performance implementation for various metacomputing tools (e.g. MPICH, CC++, Fortran M,..). Nexus is a runtime library developed to cope with wide area communication between application programs, so that workstations, supercomputers and storage devices can inter-operate with each other via ATM and non-ATM wide-area networks. This project has investigated: Nexus' support for standard communication primitives, construction of client/server applications using Nexus, Nexus' support for peer to peer server relationships and construction of Nexus directory server prototypes. One powerful and unique facility that Nexus provides is support for multiple communication methods. However, investigations found this was not fully implemented. Thus, this project also investigated techniques for choice, based on a suitable cost function between alternative communication methods. We will comment on the applications of Nexus to the DHPC project which is building an environment for integrating resources located at multiple geographically distributed locations.

PostScript version of the slides


[ DHPC Home | Projects | People | Organisations | Reports | Talks | Research | Education ]

webmaster@dhpc.adelaide.edu.au