2,111 research outputs found
A review of High Performance Computing foundations for scientists
The increase of existing computational capabilities has made simulation
emerge as a third discipline of Science, lying midway between experimental and
purely theoretical branches [1, 2]. Simulation enables the evaluation of
quantities which otherwise would not be accessible, helps to improve
experiments and provides new insights on systems which are analysed [3-6].
Knowing the fundamentals of computation can be very useful for scientists, for
it can help them to improve the performance of their theoretical models and
simulations. This review includes some technical essentials that can be useful
to this end, and it is devised as a complement for researchers whose education
is focused on scientific issues and not on technological respects. In this
document we attempt to discuss the fundamentals of High Performance Computing
(HPC) [7] in a way which is easy to understand without much previous
background. We sketch the way standard computers and supercomputers work, as
well as discuss distributed computing and discuss essential aspects to take
into account when running scientific calculations in computers.Comment: 33 page
Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies
Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use
of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed
by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of
data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across
organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and
deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless
computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid
environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of
which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This
chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and
Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE
as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on
the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features
is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure
World Wide Web Robot for Extreme Datamining with Swiss-Tx Supercomputers
This paper discusses the software and hardware issues of designing a highly parallel robot for extreme datamining on the Internet. As a sample application, a World Wide Web server count experiment for Switzerland and Thailand is presented. Our platform of choice is the SwissTx, a supercomputer built from commodity components that runs NT and COMPAQ tru64 UNIX. Hardware and software of this machine are discussed and benchmark results presented. They show that NT is a feasible choice even under the given extreme conditions. Using statistical modelling for optimizing the search process, the inevitable bandwidth problem is reduced to some extent to a computation problem. We suggest that our approach to Web robots is a robust bet for a multitude of future Internet applications which might lead to a large-scale and cost-efficient usage of Web robots
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