Enabling Technologies for Collaborative Simulators on Heterogeneous Networks

摘要

This project deals with an experimental approach to developing enabling technology for the efficient support of collaborative simulation engines on heterogeneous networked platforms. The goal is to achieve collaborative operations of two kinds: cooperative operations between distinct but neighboring numerical solvers (simulation engines), and also collaboration between users who interact with neighboring solvers during model development, experimentation and production mode operation. To deliver efficient runtime support, we propose an architecture that reuses legacy components from existing tool suites, and also offers a methodology for developing new multithreaded simulation solvers. Our focus on efficient and portable runtime support departs from the traditional view of layering application software on top of existing communication libraries and/or protocols such as TCP/IP. We believe that most of the functionality and performance problems faced by such systems (e.g., scalability, multiprotocols, communicating threads, asynchronous low-latency, high throughput communication) are directly tied to architectural issues of runtime support and protocol layering. Our idea is to eliminate the layering that separates applications from protocols, and view an application as consisting of protocol threads and communication threads. We minimize, and eventually, given direct access to secure network devices, propose to eliminate, OS kernel involvement in communication. We emphasize software portability by exploiting portable user-space threads and communication systems, and adhering to strictly portable options in threads management and protocol design.