Dataexchange: High Performance Communications in Distributed Laboratories 1 Communication Substrates for High Performance Applications

Current communications tools and libraries for high performance computing are designed for platforms and applications that exhibit relatively stable computational and communication characteristics. In contrast, the demands of (1) mixed environments in which high performance applications interact with multiple end users, visualizations, storage engines, and I/O engines { termed`distributed laboratories' in our research { and (2) high performance collaborative computing applications in general, exhibit additional complexities in terms of dynamic behaviors. This paper explores the communication requirements of distributed laboratories, and it describes the DataExchange communication infrastructure supporting their high performance interactive and collaborative applications. Communication tools and libraries for high performance distributed computing have evolved substantially during the last few years, from systems enabling distributed parallel computing such as PVMM10], to industrial standards being actively implemented and improved such as MPII9], to recent proposals for infrastructures that can facilitate the construction of nationwide , networked supercomputers. Our work contributes to such research by addressing several speciic issues that arise whenever diverse networked machines are used in research and development settings or even in production environments, by single or multiple end users. The target applications we consider are those in which end users interact with powerful computational tools and with each other across heterogeneous networked machines, termed`distributed laboratories'. The communication demands of such dynamic computational environments share some commonalities with traditional distributed systems as well as with the highly dynamic environment of today's web browsers and CORBA-based distributed object systems, but unfortunately these similar environments do not adequately