The NHSE is providing a means for the HPCC community to share software and information and thus broaden and accelerate the use of high performance computing technologies in scientific and engineering applications. By supplying the tools and mechanisms for HPCC repositories to interoperate, the NHSE is enabling different HPCC agencies and research groups to leverage each others efforts. During the next year, the NHSE will be bringing online several new domain-specific repositories as well as promoting the review and evaluation of software in these domains.
The NetSolve project is still at an early development stage and there is room for improvement at the interface level as well as at the conceptual level. At the interface level, we are thinking of providing a Java interface to NetSolve. At the conceptual level, 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. All these improvements are intended to combine ease of use, generality and performance, the main purposes of the NetSolve project.
We plan to investigate extending the NHSE Repository in a Box toolkit with a remote execution facility based on NetSolve. This facility would allow repository maintainers to provide remote access to software, instead of having users download and install the software on their own systems. We will also investigate how to provide server safe execution environments for user code so that users may upload functions for execution on a remote server. This capability is important for software packages that require user-defined functions to be provided as input.