What is Commodity Software
The world is building a wonderful distributed computing (information processing) environment using Web (dissemination) and distributed object (CORBA COM, Java, XML) technologies
This includes Java, Web-linked databases and the essential standards such as HTML(documents), VRML(3D objects), JDBC (Java database connectivity).
- The standard interfaces are essential in that they allow modular (component based) software
We will “just” add high performance to this commodity distributed infrastructure
- Respecting architecture of the object web, should allow us to naturally use improved software as it produced
The alternative strategy starts with HPCC technologies (such as MPI,HPF) and adds links to commodity world. This approach does not easily track evolution of commodity systems and so has large maintenance costs