Abstract of talk by Geoffrey Fox on
High Performance Computing (HPCC) Based on Commodity Technologies
See: http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/HPcc/HPcc.html
	We review emerging approaches to HPCC for both tightly coupled parallel 
hardware and computational grids -- geographically distributed metacomputers. We base 
the discussion on the growing power and capability of commodity computing and 
communication technologies largely driven by commercial distributed information 
systems. These systems are built from CORBA, Microsoft's COM, Javabeans, and less 
sophisticated web server and networked approaches. One can abstract these to a three-tier 
model with largely independent clients connected to a distributed network of servers. The 
latter host various services including object and relational databases and of course 
parallel and sequential computing. High performance can be obtained by combining 
concurrency at the middle server tier with optimized parallel back end services. The 
resultant system combines the needed performance for large-scale HPCC applications 
with the rich functionality of commodity systems. Further the architecture with distinct 
interface, server and specialized service implementation layers, naturally allows advances 
in each area to be easily incorporated. Adoption of community standards defined as 
CORBA facilities or Java frameworks for computing will accelerate this process. We 
suggest that this commodity approach can be applied to both metacomputing and to 
provide improved parallel programming environments. We describe exploitation issues 
within a CORBA context and illustrate how high performance can be obtained within a 
commodity architecture. Examples are given from collaborative systems, support of 
multidisciplinary interactions, proposed visual HPCC ComponentWare programming 
environment, distributed simulation and the use of Java in high performance computing.