Distributed problem solving environments for scientific computing

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to research the issues involved in creating distributed problem solving environments for scientific computing. As part of our evaluation, we have developed a distributed problem solving environment called DPSolve which combines a very high level language, an interactive X Windows interface and a set of powerful problem solving methods into a single environment. The interface is designed to work on any system running X Windows, whilst the computations are done on a more powerful parallel computer. We implemented the interface on a DEC3100 workstation running ULTRIX, which communicates with procedures running on a Sequent 581 with 10 processors, running DYNIX via RPC.

The design decisions and implementation details of our system are discussed at length along with a detailed example of the system at work. We critically evaluate the approach we have taken and show why it can scale to a very large class of scientific problems. We conclude that this distributed environment should be a representative of future scientific problem solving environments.