Ninf: A network based information library for global world-wide computing infrastructure

Abstract

Ninf is an ongoing global network-wide computing infrastructure project which allows users to access computational resources including hardware, software and scientific data distributed across a wide area network. Ninf is intended not only to exploit high performance in network parallel computing, but also to provide high quality numerical computation services and accesses to scientific database published by other researchers. Computational resources are shared as Ninf remote libraries executable at a remote Ninf server. Users can build an application by calling the libraries with the Ninf Remote Procedure Call, which is designed to provide a programming interface similar to conventional function calls in existing languages, and is tailored for scientific computation. In order to facilitate location transparency and network-wide parallelism, Ninf metaserver maintains global resource information regarding computational server and databases, allocating and scheduling coarse-grained computation for global load balancing. Ninf also interfaces with the WWW browsers for easy accessibility.