Research Assistant: S. Markus
Sponsor: Intel
Enabled by advances in hardware, networking infrastructure and algorithms, highly compute intensive problems in many areas can now be successfully attacked using networked scientific computing. In the network-based paradigm, vital pieces of software and information used by a computing process are spread across the network, and are identified and linked together only at run time. With network-accessible software repositories and networked computing, the view of software changes from a product to a service. A network-accessible repository provides access to up-to-date copies of software components on an as-needed basis, so called "disposable software."
The Net PELLPACK project is a Web-based network computing system which allows users to access and use the problem solving power of the PELLPACK problem solving environment. Building on our earlier Web PELLPACK system, Net PELLPACK is a next generation Web computing environment which uses PELLPACK's back-end but completely replaces the user interface environment with a Java applet based on a different usage metaphor. Net PELLPACK eliminates most of the limitations of Web PELLPACK and allows users to solve complex PDE problems using any Web browser that supports Java applets. It uses a Java applet that serves as the graphical user interface, a stateful text-based protocol (NetPP) and a Net PELLPACK server (NetPPD) running on some machine or machines anywhere on the network. We address several research issues in network computing including user interface and protocol design, application security, software delivery in directly usable form, and network computational servers.
Information regarding this project is available at pellpack.cs.purdue.edu/netpp/.