NetSolve / GridSolve By Milan Novakovic, Steven Morgan

What is NetSolve?  A Distributed system... Duh  Aimed at helping scientists find a wide range of helpful tools

Historically  Optimized for specific platforms  No convenient interface  Tools are rarely freely available: MATLAB and Mathematica

Overview  Developed at the University of Tennessee.  Set of loosely connected machines  Heterogeneous environment i.e., the machines of different architectures, OSs and internal data representations can participate at the same time

Grid Middleware

Status on NetSolve  Official release of NetSolve 2.0 in July, 2003  Rebranded to GridSolve  Latest version release in December 2008

Recent Additions  Hardware/Software server transparency  Dynamic server  Octave support  Condor-G support  Distributed Storage Interface  GridRPC  Interface Definition Language  Cygwin/Mac OSX support  VisPerf Monitor

NetSolve Agents

 Maintains index of computational resources & their characteristics  Accepts requests from clients and dispatches them to the best-suited server

Best suited?  Keeps track of computational resource status  Servers register their capabilities by PDF  Designed to optimize resource utilization  Tracks performance metrics of the servers

NetSolve Servers  Each server is a computational resource  Uniform access to software  Functionalities extendable at will

 Machine-independent description language  Compiled by NetSolve tools into computational modules  Pre-written for FitPack, ItPack, MINPACK, FFTPACK, LAPACK, BLAS, QMR, ScaLAPACK

Fault Tolerance  A NetSolve system is ELASTIC  Mechanism used is “retry”

Contributions Drawbacks  One of the earlier Grid computing systems, influenced a lot of later work  Machine-independent systems  Bringing together computational resources across a variety of hardware AND software  Ease of use across different libraries  Resource optimization  What can this HW/SW package do BEST  Load-balancing  Very dated information  Lack of performance metrics  Lack of comparison against other systems Improvements  Some actual data statistics would be nice  Further in-depth analysis regarding NetSolve’s ability to optimize the system by swapping processes amongst better suited hardware

Questions!

References   Henri Casanova, Jack Dongarra, Chris Johnson, and Michelle Miller, "Section 7.3: Case Study: NetSolve", In Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, editors, The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastracture, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, July 1998, pages (available from the instructor)  Arnold, Dorian C, Henri Casanova, and Jack Dongarra. "Innovations of the Netsolve Grid Computing System." Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 14 (2002): Print.