Software infrastructure for the I-WAY metacomputing experiment
Ian T Foster, Jonathan Geisler, Bill Nickless, Warren Smith, Steven Tuecke · Concurrency Practice and Experience · 1998
High-speed wide-area networks are expected to enable innovative applications that integrate geographically distributed, high-performance computing, database, graphics and networking resources. However, there is as yet little understanding of the higher-level services required to support these applications, or of the techniques required to implement these services in a scalable, secure manner. We report on a large-scale prototyping effort that has yielded some insights into these issues. Building on the hardware base provided by the I-WAY, a national-scale asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network, we developed an integrated management and application programming system, called I-Soft. This system was deployed at most of the 17 I-WAY sites and used by many of the 60 applications demonstrated on the I-WAY network. In this paper we describe the I-Soft design and report on lessons learned from application experiments. We focus on four novel concepts that we believe may have relevance to future, similar systems: point of presence machines as a means of simplifying implementation and management; scheduler proxies to integrate local schedulers to computational resource brokers; authentication proxies to provide a uniform authentication environment across multiple administrative domains; and network-aware parallel programming tools to hide heterogeneity and improve performance in heterogeneous environments. Lessons learned in building I-Soft have motivated subsequent research and development efforts in the Globus project. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.