Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 | University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, Knoxville, TN | Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Knoxville, TN 37831 | University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996
Abstract: Network computing seeks to utilize the aggregate resources of many
networked computers to solve a single problem. In so doing it is
often possible to obtain supercomputer performance from an inexpensive local
area network. The drawback is that network computing is complicated and error
prone when done by hand, especially if the computers have different
operating systems and data formats and are thus heterogeneous. The
heterogeneous network computing environment (HeNCE) is an integrated
graphical environment for creating and running parallel programs over
a heterogeneous collection of computers. It is built on a
lower level package called parallel virtual machine (PVM). The HeNCE philosophy of parallel programming is to
have the programmer graphically specify the parallelism of a computation and to
automate, as much as possible, the tasks of writing, compiling, executing, debugging, and
tracing the network computation. Key to HeNCE is a graphical language
based on directed graphs that describe the parallelism and data dependencies of
an application. Nodes in the graphs represent conventional Fortran or
C subroutines and the arcs represent data and control flow. This article
describes the present state of HeNCE, its capabilities, limitations, and areas
of future research.
