2000-05: Harness – Heterogeneous Distributed Computing
The heterogeneous adaptable reconfigurable networked systems (Harness) research project focused on the design and development of a pluggable lightweight heterogeneous Distributed Virtual Machine (DVM) environment, where clusters of PCs, workstations, and “big iron” supercomputers can be aggregated to form one giant DVM (in the spirit of its widely-used predecessor, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM)). As part of the Harness project, a variety of experiments and system prototypes were developed to explore lightweight pluggable frameworks, adaptive reconfigurable runtime environments, assembly of scientific applications from software modules, parallel plug-in paradigms, highly available DVMs, fault-tolerant message passing (FT-MPI), fine-grain security mechanisms, and heterogeneous reconfigurable communication frameworks. Three different Harness system prototypes were developed, two C variants and one Java-based alternative, each concentrating on different research issues. The technology developed within the Harness project influenced many other research and development efforts, such as the Open Run-Time Environment (ORTE). For more information, please visit www.csm.ornl.gov/harness.
Funding Sources
- Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy
Participating Institutions
Important Publications
Symbols: 
Abstract, 
Publication, 
Presentation, 
BibTeX Citation, 
DOI Link
- Emanuele Di Saverio, Marco Cesati, Christian Di Biagio, Guido Pennella, and Christian Engelmann. Distributed Real-Time Computing with Harness. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Proceedings of the 14th European PVM/MPI Users` Group Meeting (EuroPVM/MPI) 2007, pages 281-288, Paris, France, September 30 – October 3, 2007. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany. ISBN 978-3-540-75415-2. ISSN 0302-9743.
- Ronald Baumann, Christian Engelmann, and George A. (Al) Geist. A Parallel Plug-in Programming Paradigm. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) 2006, pages 823-832, Munich, Germany, September 13-15, 2006. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany. ISBN 978-3-540-39368-9. ISSN 0302-9743.
- Christian Engelmann and George A. (Al) Geist. RMIX: A Dynamic, Heterogeneous, Reconfigurable Communication Framework. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS) 2006, Part II: 3rd Special Session on Collaborative and Cooperative Environments (CCE) 2006, pages 573-580, Reading, UK, May 28-31, 2006. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany. ISBN 3-540-34381-4. ISSN 0302-9743.