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For researchers with big problems and small budgets, NCSA
Symera'sTM implementation of
cluster computing promises a new source of support for
high-throughput projects that might
otherwise have to languish in contention for scarce
supercomputer allocations or resort to
oversimplified statistical models that compromise reliability.
Like the
Condor project at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison which inspired its development,
Symera takes advantage of the
radically improved processing power of off-the-shelf personal
computers to offer researchers an
affordable alternative
to conventional supercomputers.
Symera was developed in conjunction with Microsoft to leverage
an institution's existing hardware
investment. "Symera is a set of software tools," said NCSA
program manager Briand Sanderson,
"that enable a group of NT systems, interconnected as
a single Windows NT domain to
collectively run parallel, distributed applications in a
way that scales with the application. It
harvests
the unused cycles of idle machines under that domain
without interfering with an individual
computer owner's system usage."
Programmers choosing to work with Symera have access
to the veritable plethora of feature-rich
applications supporting compilation, debugging, and
text editing in the NT environment.
Furthermore, Intel's introduction of the Microsoft (MS)
Windows NT compatible Merced
microprocessor means that developers wondering what
programming for the next generation of
supercomputers might be like, can get an early
preview by designing, writing, and debugging
applications for Symera.
It's native NT implementation promises a shallow
learning curve for application developers new to
the Symera system. "You don't even, necessarily,"
said Sanderson, "have to have a background in
parallel coding to use Symera." In some instances,
Symera allows a program to realize
performance benefits of scale by wrapping itself
around legacy code and executing the
encapsulated code in parallel on a Symera system.
Symera encapsulates such legacy code under the Distributed Component
Object Model (DCOM), the network version of the Component Object
Model (COM), which Microsoft has implemented as
ActiveXTM. COM
is an open standard developed by Microsoft that provides software
developers with a blueprint for reusable code.
Fundamentally, Symera is a set of objects that follow the
DCOM specification. Each object falls within one of three
categories: Resource Managers,
Drones, and Nodes.
The Resource Manager objects administer the system while
the Drones do the work.
Initial performance tests have been encouraging.
According to Sanderson, these tests
demonstrate that groups of NT client workstations,
applied collectively under Symera to the
solution of high-throughput problems, can be used
as a parallel computing environment with
near-linear speed up. Now his team is busy working
on features to enable load balancing and
mechanisms to link Symera to high-performance
technologies such as hybrid network
configurations and University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Professor
Andrew Chien's Fast Messaging and
HPVM
systems. But developers interested in using Symera
can get the current Developer Preview 2 from
the Symera website
and, for little or no additional expense, put
their NT networks to work providing a maximum
return on their hardware investment and cheap
parallelism, too.
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