The Schooner Project
Supercomputing '95 Research Exhibit

December 4-7, 1995
San Diego Convention Center

The Schooner Project is investigating the use of software interconnection systems in the design of scientific meta-computations. Meta-computations are built from heterogeneous collections of applications that cooperate in the solution of a problem. An interconnection system must solve the dual problems of establishing communications and data exchange among the applications and providing configuration tools that allow flexible and dynamic mappings of components onto hosts. The Schooner system provides such tools in the context of scientific applications and is being used with several meta-computations that were demonstrated at Supercomputing '95. The meta-computations are on-going projects developed through collaborations with the NASA Numerical Propulsion System Simulator (NPSS) project and an NSF-funded Ecosystem Modeling project. The demonstrations included a jet engine simulation that combines one- and three-dimensional engine component simulations; and a high performance ecosystem meta-computation combining visualization, parallel simulation, and remote GIS database applications. These meta-computations include components developed in a variety of scientific programming languages, and use several different programming models. They employed a variety of workstations within the booth and remote machines distributed over a wide geographic area.