Interconnecting interactive and remote parallel components using schooner

Abstract

In scientific applications where parallel computation is used to model physical processes, enhancing the user's ability to monitor and control programs executing on remote parallel machines can improve the overall experimental process. Here, a simple approach to providing such facilities is presented in which a scientific visualization system and a remote parallel computation are incorporated into a single metacomputation using the Schooner software interconnection system. This scheme gives the user the ability to, for example, select dynamically the parallel platform to be used, monitor the progress of the computation, and modify parameters. To illustrate this approach, a series of experiments is described in which the AVS scientific visualization system and a parallel neural net code executing on either an Intel Paragon, Sequent Symmetry, or PVMbased Sun Sparcstation cluster are interconnected. These experiments demonstrate not just the feasibility of structuring parallel computations as part of a larger metacomputation using Schooner, but also that these benefits can be achieved with an adjustable cost that can be tuned to the specific needs of the application.