Research Assistants: F. Knop, J.-C. Gomez
Sponsors: ONR, DoE, PRF
The EcliPSe project [1,2] originated at the Oak Ridge National Labs. in the summer of 1990. The intent was to experimentally demonstrate that a heterogeneous network environment could be viewed as a massively parallel processor for a variety of computations, in particular for simulation and domain-specific computations. Using a few simple but pragmatic rules, we designed and built a fault-tolerant software environment for network-based computing. The EcliPSe project was awarded the 1992 Gordon Bell Prize [3] for price/performance, based on a superconcurrent polymer chain simulation which simultaneously utilized about 200 heterogeneous machines dispersed across the U.S. (see Figure 1).