A Problem Solving Environment for Network Centric Computing

The current advances in high-speed networks and WWW technologies have made network computing a cost-effective high performance computing environment. The new software development models and problem solving environments must be developed to utilize the network computing environment efficiently. In this paper we present the Virtual Distributed Computing Environment (VDCE) as a problem solving environment for high-performance distributed computing over wide-area networks. The VDCE enables scientists to develop parallel and distributed applications without knowing the detailed architecture of the underlying computing and communication resources. The VDCE provides well-defined library functions that relieve the end users from tedious task implementations and it supports software reusability. The VDCE software architecture consists of two modules: The Application Editor, and the VDCE Runtime System. The Application Editor is a Web-based graphical user interface that helps user to develop network applications and specifies the computing and communication properties of each application task. The VDCE Runtime System schedules the individual tasks of the application to the best available resources, runs, and manages the application execution. We also present how the VDCE can be used as a problem solving environment and how the users can experiment with and evaluate the performance of their applications for different hardware and/or software configurations.