The focus of this project are novel methodologies for concurrent and distributed computing on heterogeneous networks. The proposed IceT system builds upon prior work in metacomputing technologies and extends this mode of high performance computing to incorporate cooperative resource sharing, process mobility, and agent technologies. IceT facilitates the development of portable software modules and application sub-components that are freely exchangeable among users; these modules may also be used as vehicles for modifying or enhancing virtual machine (VM) characteristics. Such a cooperative metacomputing environment facilitated by IceT will provide the traditional benefits of high performance computing on networked systems while enabling significant new and emerging distributed applications. A core activity of our proposed project will be to investigate issues in dynamic merging and splitting of virtual machines and developing mechanisms to allocate pooled resources in accordance with owners' constraints.
The second major portion of the proposed work involves the creation of a computational infrastructure in which processes may be uploaded and soft-installed at remote locations, migrated during execution, or travel as an agent to several parts of the VM. The basis for this model in IceT is the Java language. IceT builds a complete runtime system upon Java facilities to allow movement not only of bytecode, but also natively compiled relocatable object modules, thereby enabling high efficiencies for compute-intensive applications. A major portion of our effort will be devoted to designing and constructing the mobile process infrastructure in IceT, with particular focus on resource management and security issues inherent in merged virtual machines.
