NetSolve / GridSolveBy Milan Novakovic, Steven Morgan

What is NetSolve? A Distributed system... Duh Aimed at helping scientists find a wide range of helpful tools

Historically Optimized for specific platforms No convenient interface Tools are rarely freely available: MATLAB and Mathematica

Overview Developed at the University of Tennessee. Set of loosely connected machines Heterogeneous environment i.e., the

machines of different architectures, OSs and internal data representations can participate at the same time

NetSolve

Grid Middleware

Status on NetSolve Official release of NetSolve 2.0 in July, 2003 Rebranded to GridSolve

Latest version release 0.19.1 in December 2008

Recent Additions Hardware/Software server transparency Dynamic server Octave support Condor-G support Distributed Storage Interface GridRPC Interface Definition Language Cygwin/Mac OSX support VisPerf Monitor

NetSolve Agents

NetSolve Agents

Maintains index of computational resources & their characteristics

Accepts requests from clients and dispatches them to the best-suited server

Best suited? Keeps track of computational resource status Servers register their capabilities by PDF Designed to optimize resource utilization

Tracks performance metrics of the servers

NetSolve Servers Each server is a computational resource Uniform access to software Functionalities extendable at will

Machine-independent description language Compiled by NetSolve tools into computational modules Pre-written for FitPack, ItPack, MINPACK, FFTPACK, LAPACK, BLAS, QMR, ScaLAPACK

Fault Tolerance A NetSolve system is ELASTIC Mechanism used is “retry”

Contributions Drawbacks

One of the earlier Grid computing systems, influenced a lot of later work

Machine-independent systems Bringing together computational resources

across a variety of hardware AND software Ease of use across different libraries Resource optimization

What can this HW/SW package do BEST Load-balancing

Very dated information Lack of performance metrics Lack of comparison against other systems

Improvements Some actual data statistics would be nice Further in-depth analysis regarding

NetSolve’s ability to optimize the system by swapping processes amongst better suited hardware

Questions!

References http://icl.cs.utk.edu/netsolve/ Henri Casanova, Jack Dongarra, Chris Johnson, and Michelle Miller, "Section 7.3:

Case Study: NetSolve", In Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, editors, The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastracture, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, July 1998, pages 171-175 (available from the instructor)

Arnold, Dorian C, Henri Casanova, and Jack Dongarra. "Innovations of the Netsolve Grid Computing System." Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 14 (2002): 1457-1479. Print.