Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 23 August 1998

Foil 94 What is Commodity Software

From CPS615-Introduction-Course,Driving Technology and HPCC Current Status and Futures CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- Fall Semester 98. by Geoffrey C. Fox, (Some Culler, Koelbel material)


The world is building a wonderful distributed computing (information processing) environment using Web (dissemination) and distributed object (CORBA COM) 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



© Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

If you have any comments about this server, send e-mail to webmaster@npac.syr.edu.

Page produced by wwwfoil on Sat Aug 29 1998