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Distributed Computing (Class Library)
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Q2ADPZ (Quite Advanced Distributed Parallel Zystem) "is an open source implementation of a system for distributed computing. The system allows the management/use of the computational power of idle computers in a network. The users of the system can send computing tasks to these computers to be executed, which can be in the form of a dynamic library, an executable program or any program which can be interpreted (Java, Perl, etc.). Platforms supported are Linux, Unix, Win32 and MacOS X.
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The latest company to see the wisdom potential in the IT Crowd is Terracotta which makes an amazing Java distributed computing platform. Terracotta's technology implements what has long been a holy grail of sorts in the distributed computing space: a distributed shared-memory cluster. What this means, put simply, is a cluster of machines that can where programs can be written as though they were going to run on a single machine yet share memory (such as files, global variables, etc). Such beasts have existed but they usually require very specific hardware (for example, a shared memory system using Intel and AMD cluster nodes is really hard to pull off due to the differences in the underlying architectures of the two chip families); expensive high-speed switching systems to move data around as quickly as possible to lessen the impact on the processors, and a lot of very fancy, specialized programming and very fancy shared memory frameworks to pull off.
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If you are new to distributed computing, you might want to first familiarize yourself with the basic concepts by learning about Xgrid. To start with, read the article, Xgrid: High-performance Computing for the Rest of Us, which explains how Apple's Advanced Computational Group developed Xgrid to make it easy to run a set of calculations on many machines using machine-dependent parameters. With Xgrid, developers can stay focused on the science and mathematics and not be distracted by having to set up a network of computers. Xgrid is included with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger; you can download the Xgrid Technology Preview 2 for the Panther version of Mac OS X.
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To address this problem, a new generation of distributed computing programs is now coming on-line. BOINC - the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - provides a platform that any project can use. Scientists in any field can now sign up for BOINC and with only minor modifications immediately become part of an established and successful program of distributed computing.
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This wonderful paper by Frank Buschmann and Kevlin Henney provides some useful information about software design patterns for distributed computing. A worthwhile read for relaxation at the weekend The document has been written for the EuroPLoP 2002 conference. There are some more very interesting texts available at http://www.hillside.net/patterns/EuroPLoP2002/.
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Dcom "is a skeleton set of C programs and files which allows you to convert your favorite long running mathematical problem programs into distributed computing applications. It supports signing for safe automatic program executible updates, runs on X86 Linux and Windows, and its clients are self-installing executibles."
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Distributed Computing (Class Library)