Focused Effort Title: Using Handheld Devices to Access HPC Resources

Organization: Florida State University

Thematic Area(s): 	HPC Training and DoD User Productivity

Lead: David Bernholdt

Email Address: bernhold@npac.syr.edu

Telephone: 315 443 3857		Fax: 315 443 1973

Statement of Work:

The increasing capability and availability of handheld computing and
communications devices makes them interesting as interfaces to
information and computer resources.  The "commodity" applications of
these tools typically involves personal information management and
communications, and access to a variety of public information bases.
Clearly, these same capabilities can be applied to other areas, such
as facilitating the work of DoD researchers by increasing their access
to HPC resources and scientific/technical information services.  This
proposal is aimed at developing a better understanding of the
applications and limitations of handheld computing and communication
devices in the DoD HPC environment.

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 accomodate the different capabilities of various display
devices.  This model is described and developed further in the
accompanying "Training Portals FE".

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 accomodate 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 accomodate 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.

Note: Because of likely security and support issues, we expect to
produce a _demonstration_ system, using dummy job data and based at
FSU rather than at the ERDC MSRC.  Every effort will be made to
accomodate the MSRC's security requirements, but it is not clear that
the technology and standards are up to the task yet. Our current
expectation is that the gateway will have to operate in a "protected
environment", with security and authentication handled by external
mechanisms. We would like to maintain a dialog with MSRC staff on
security aspects of this project.  Once it is ready, we will be happy
to cooperate with MSRC staff to setup an instance of the system for
experimental use on site.

Deliverables:
o Demonstration of HPC job information gateway for handheld devices
o Assistance with installation of the system at ERDC MSRC if desired
o Final technical report on project, March 2001
o Technical report assessing security and handheld devices in the DoD
  HPCMP context, March 2001
o Presentations for PET Midyear and Annual Reviews
o Inputs to PET Annual Report
o Written progress reports in June and December 2000

Customer Commitment/Involvement:

Ongoing dialog with MSRC staff about security and handheld devices
would be helpful to this project.

Required Resources: $57,520

Item			Base	Fringe	Overhead	Total
David Bernholdt		11,039	 2,031	 6,078		19,148
1.5 Graduate Students	24,000	  144	11,228		35,372
	 Tuition	 3,000	    -	    -		 3,000

TOTAL							57,520