Given the work going on in "computing portals" world (activities supported by DoD, DOE, NSF, industry, etc.), it makes sense to envision the connectivity to HPC resources as services offered by a portal, and the handheld simply as a device with a particular set of capabilities that can link with the portal server. In this way the services don't have to be implemented separately for every different display device that comes along, and the portal can act as a flexible gateway to accommodate the different capabilities of various display devices.

This project will demonstrate connectivity between HPC job and status information and handheld devices. In keeping with the portal/gateway concept described above, traditional web browser based access to the same information will be provided, but it will not be the primary focus of this project. Information available will include job initiation, progress, and termination (such as can be obtained from the batch queuing system). We will also investigate the possibility of including user-provided data (for example periodically providing the trailing few lines of the job's output file). Two-way interaction (such as user job cancellation and simple steering) will also be considered in the design, but will not be implemented unless we find a way to do this in general, taking into account security considerations.

The emphasis of this work will be on the architecture and design of the gateway which links the handheld device to the fixed information base. To accommodate the intermittent nature of communications with most handheld devices, the gateway will have to queue messages for delivery, and will have the ability to filter/transform messages based considerations of both the display device and "quality of service" (for example, for messages which periodically monitor the progress of a job, usually all but the most recent can be dropped, while other messages should be transmitted regardless). The gateway will be designed to accommodate a broad range of handheld devices and communications channels ranging from pagers (gateway pushes messages to device, but functionality is extremely limited) to personal digital assistants (gateway generally waits to be polled, but much more functionality is possible). We will emphasize the use of commodity/standard tools and technologies; the emerging Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is of particular importance at this stage since it appears to have substantial momentum and significant functionality.