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 [&make_named_href('', "node19.html#matlab","[5]")] 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, thus helping to ensure good performance through choice of an appropriate package.. Moreover, NetSolve uses a load-balancing strategy to improve the use of the computational resources available. Some other systems are currently being developed to achieve somewhat similar goals. Among them are the Network based Information Library for high performance computing (Ninf) [&make_named_href('', "node19.html#ninf","[6]")] project which is very comparable to NetSolve in its way of operation, and the Remote Computation System (RCS) [&make_named_href('', "node19.html#rcs","[7]")] which is a remote procedure call facility for providing uniform access to a variety of supercomputers.
We introduce 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.