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Computational Grids and Commodity Technologies for CFD

Application talks by Manny Salas and Ray Cosner were in counterpoint to two software talks This is second software talk

A computational grid is a large-scale high performance distributed computing system that presents new challenges from the heterogeneity of the nodes and the variable and sometimes poor performance of network latency and bandwidth.

Application support should include both programming the typically data parallel simulation modules and the composition of modules to build complete processing systems.

So the challenges are supporting fine grain concurrency within a single processor, data parallelism within a tightly coupled system and dataflow or other compositional model between nodes of the grid.

Kennedy's talk reviewed the available technologies: auto-parallelism, explicit communication, distributed shared memory, data parallel languages, task or module parallelism, libraries typically supporting SPMD programming, programming tools, resource management, latency tolerance and run-time compilation. Each approach has clear positive and negative features and any successful programming environment must combine many of these together. Any good approach is likely to need performance estimation, whole-program compilation, new approaches to compilation for scripted and visual environments, run-time compilation, libraries and programming support tools.

This presentation by Fox stressed that there were important systems engineering advantages in building computational grid support on "commodity technologies" such as CORBA and the Web.

This allowed one to exploit database, collaboration and the natural software integration capabilities of these impressive commercial systems designed for pervasive information systems such as worldwide commerce and corporate enterprise Intranets.

There are some critical research issues in how best to incorporate high performance into these systems without losing the power and flexibility of the commodity approach.

Table of Contents for Computational Grids and Commodity Technologies for CFD

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