DISCWorld: A Distributed High Performance Computing Environment

An increasing number of science and engineering applications require distributed and parallel computing resources to satisfy user response-time requirements. Distributed science and engineering applications require a high performance “middleware” which will both allow the embedding of legacy applications as well as enable new distributed programs, and which allows the best use of existing and specialised (parallel) computing resources. We are developing a distributed information systems control environment which will meet the needs of a middleware for scientific applications. We describe our DISCWorld system and some of its key attributes. A critical attribute is architecture scalability. We discuss DISCWorld in the context of some existing middleware systems such as CORBA and other distributed computing research systems such as Legion and Globus. Our approach is to embed applications in the middleware as services, which can be chained together. User interfaces are provided in the form of Java Applets downloadable across the World Wide Web. These form a gateway for user-requests to be transmitted into a semi-opaque “cloud” of high-performance resources for distributed execution.