NetSolve: A Network Previous:

NetSolve: A Network

Introduction

An ongoing thread of research in scientific computing is the efficient solution of large problems. Various mechanisms have been developed to perform computations across diverse platforms. The most common mechanism involves software libraries. Unfortunately, the use of such libraries presents several difficulties. Some software libraries are highly optimized for only certain platforms and do not provide a convenient interface to other computer systems. Other libraries demand considerable programming effort from the user, who may not have the time to learn the required programming techniques. While a limited number of tools have been developed to alleviate these difficulties, such tools themselves are usually available only on a limited number of computer systems. MATLAB [1] is an example of such a tool.

These considerations motivated the establishment of the NetSolve project. NetSolve is a client-server application designed to solve computational science problems over a network. A number of different interfaces have been developed to the NetSolve software so that users of C, Fortran, MATLAB, or the World Wide Web can easily use the NetSolve system. The underlying computational software can be any scientific package, thereby ensuring good performance results. Moreover, NetSolve uses a load-balancing strategy to improve the use of the computational resources available.

This paper introduces the NetSolve system, its architecture and the concepts on which it is based. We then describe how NetSolve can be used to solve complex scientific problems.