NCSA Symbio

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NCSA Symbio

• Supercomputing System

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What is Symbio?

• A system for doing parallel distributed
  computing over a cluster of NT workstations.
• A set of object-oriented components, built on top
  of DCOM, which manage jobs submitted to the
  system.

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Goals for Symbio 1.0

• Enable quick and easy development of parallel
  applications on Windows NT
• Batch mode (traditional job submission,
  execution, and notification methods)
• Interactive mode (one or more people interacting
  with the same job from different locations)
• Provide a mechanism for scavenging unused CPU
  cycles on NT based machines

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Why Should I Use Symbio?

• Drone development is easy

• Appwizard to quickly generate code
• Not programming language specific
• Can use COM objects already built

• Administration is easy
• Simple installation
• Robust utilities for cluster management
• Cheap parallelism. Why waste CPU cycles?

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A Sample Symbio Cluster
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Performance Data
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Performance Data (Part II)
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Directions for Symbio

• Extensive fault tolerance and checkpointing
• Clusters across the Internet
• Support HDF
• AppWizards for Java and Visual Basic
• Zero Administration Symbio

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Symbio Today

• Symbio Developer Preview (S3DP) is available now
  for testing.

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What to do now

• We are looking for partners to help drive future
  development of Symbio.
• Contact Briand Sanderson
• briand_at_ncsa.uiuc.edu
• Technical Program Manager
• URL
• http//symbio.ncsa.uiuc.edu/

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End
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What is a Drone?

• A piece of compiled code that does the actual
  work of a job submitted to Symbio.
• A class derived from a C base class which
  abstracts all the Symbio system code from the
  user. The user only need to know how to invoke
  methods to write parallel code.
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