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Current Status

An Internet-accessible prototype of the National HPCC Software Exchange has been developed . The goals of the prototype are the following:

• Show the feasibility of distributing software and information via the National Information Infrastructure.
• Demonstrate access to existing software repositories.
• Demonstrate browsing and searching mechanisms.
• Identify limitations of current information retrieval techniques and areas needing further development.

The prototype NHSE was designed to be accessed from an forms-capable World Wide Web (WWW) browser, such as recent versions of NCSA Mosaic or Netscape Communication. The information and software were either already available or were made available using existing information access systems, such as FTP, Gopher, WAIS, and HTTP.

A user-friendly interface has been constructed in the form of a distributed HTML document. The root of this document is the NHSE home page, which contains an outline from which users can reach all the collected HPCC information with a few clicks of the mouse. Users may also perform a keyword search on a free-text index of this distributed document.

The amount and diversity of material already available are too great to be able to provide a comprehensive summary here. Rather, descriptions of a small sample will be given to provide you with some idea of what is available.

The NHSE includes Netlib , which is a moderated collection of high-quality mathematical software and parallel programming tools. Netlib contains some packages specifically designed for high performance computing, such as LAPACK and ScaLAPACK, which are libraries of numerical linear algebra subroutines [2]. LAPACK is designed to run efficiently on shared-memory vector and parallel processors, while ScaLAPACK is designed for distributed-memory multiprocessors. Netlib also contains a number of parallel programming environments, such as MPI, P4, PICL, PRESTO, and PVM.

The NHSE includes pointers to a number of other established software repositories, such as ASSET, CARDS, DSRS, and ELSA. In the future, the NHSE will interoperate with these other repositories so that software from them may be retrieved directly from the NHSE interface.

The NHSE also points to a number of independently-provided specialized software collections. For example, the software exchange site maintained by the HPCC Group at the University of Washington Astronomy Department contains tools for visualizing and doing calculations on output from cosmological N-body simulations.

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