Scalable networked information processing environment (SNIPE)

Abstract

Scalable Networked Information Processing Environment (SNIPE) is a metacomputing system that aims to provide a reliable, secure, fault-tolerant environment for long-term distributed computing applications and data stores across the global Internet. This system combines global naming and replication of both processing and data to support large-scale information processing applications leading to better availability and reliability than currently available with typical cluster computing and/or distributed computer environments. To facilitate this the system supports: distributed data collection, distributed computation, distributed control and resource management, distributed output and process migration. The underlying system supports multiple communication paths, media and routing methods to aid performance and robustness across both local and global networks. This paper details the goals, design and an initial implementation of SNIPE, and then demonstrates its usefulness in supporting a middleware project. Initial communications performance is also presented.