Applying NetSolve's network-enabled server

The scientific community has long used the Internet for communication of e-mail, software, and papers. Until recently, there has been little use of the network for actual computations. This solution is changing rapidly and will have an enormous impact on the future. The NetSolve system described here has a significant role to play in these developments. The NetSolve project lets users access computational resources, both hardware and software, distributed across the network. Thanks to a variety of interfaces, users can easily perform scientific computing tasks without having any computing resources installed on their computers. Research issues involved in the NetSolve system include fault tolerance, load balancing, user interface design, computational servers, virtual libraries, and network based computing. As the project matures, several promising extensions and applications of NetSolve will emerge. We describe the project and examine some of the extensions being developed for NetSolve: an interface to the Condor system, an interface to the ScaLapack parallel library, a bridge with the Ninf system, and an integration of NetSolve and ImageVision.