NetSolve: A Network
Previous: Performance
Because the NetSolve project is still at an early development stage there is room for improvement at the interface level as well as at the conceptual level.
We plan to increase the number of interactive interfaces. For instance, we could write Maple and Mathematica interfaces, similar to the MATLAB one. Currently, we are thinking of providing the user with a Java interface. Such an interface should be easy to use and immediately accessible via the Web.
The load-balancing strategy must be improved in order to change the ``best guess'' into a ``best choice'' as much as possible. The challenge is to come close to a best choice without flooding the network. The danger is to waste more time computing this best choice than the computation would have taken in the case of a best guess only. Also, we might wish to add a hierarchy in the NetSolve systems, so that a single system could cover a large-scale network efficiently.
Some new issues are raised also when trying to make NetSolve easier to interface with any arbitrary software. One of those is the ``user-defined function'' problem. Some scientific packages require the user to provide a function in order to solve a problem (typically with iterative methods). We are investigating different approaches to allow this in NetSolve.
All these improvements are intended to combine ease of use, generality and performance, the main purposes of the NetSolve project.