Ninf: A network based information library for global world-wide computing infrastructure

Abstract

Abstract.Ninf is an ongoing global network-wide computing infrastructure project which allows users to access computational resources including hardware, software and scientific data distributed across a wide area network. Ninf is intended not only to exploit high performance in network parallel computing, but also to provide high quality numerical computation services and accesses to scientific database published by other researchers. Computational resources are shared as Ninf remote libraries executable at a remote Ninf server. Users can build an application by calling the libraries with the Ninf Remote Procedure Call, which is designed to provide a programming interface similar to conventional function calls in existing languages, and is tailored for scientific computation. In order to facilitate location transparency and network-wide parallelism, Ninf metaserver maintains global resource information regarding computational server and databases, allocating and scheduling coarse-grained computation for global load balancing. Ninf also interfaces with the WWW browsers for easy accessibility.

Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

“…AppLeS [28], Ninf [30], Nimrod-G [29], NASA IPG [36], Condor-G [31], Gridbus Broker [32], UK eScience Project [33], GriPhyN [35], and EU Data Grid [34].…”

A study of deadline scheduling for client-server systems on the Computational Grid

“…Currently deployed NES systems (NetSolve [13] and Ninf [32]) use the greedy on-line scheduling algorithm described in [24] as MCT (Minimum completion Time). For each incoming request, the scheduler assigns the request to the server that completes it the earliest.…”

“…For future work, we plan to make Bricks support more sophisticated economy models as they become available, investigate their feasibility, and then, implement the deadline scheduling algorithm within actual NES systems (starting with Ninf [32] …”

“…Advances in network technology have made it increasingly possible to deploy HPC applications over the widearea, thereby accessing unprecedented amounts of compute and storage resources. Many Grid software systems have been developed and it has become possible to deploy real applications on these systems [32,16,21,23]. A crucial issue for the efficient deployment of HPC applications on the Grid is that of scheduling [6].…”

“…These systems have been traditionally called Network-enabled Servers (NES) [13,32,22,15] and are currently in use for many types of applications. These systems usually implement client-server architectures and provide users with an RPC-style programming model.…”