A metacomputing environment for demanding applications: design, implementation, experiments and business benefit

The paper describes the design, implementation, and use of a commercial metacomputing environment for computationally intensive loosely-coupled parallel applications. Much weight has been laid on practical and commercialisation aspects, and on business benefit. This distinguishes this work from many other metacomputing activities in a positive way. It demonstrates how a metacomputing environment can be used to improve a company’s position in the market. A cluster of networked geographically dispersed computing nodes is considered as physical layer. The proposed distribution of work over the nodes of the execution network is proven optimal, in terms of minimizing the execution time, with respect to the availability of resources. We also present our experience on testing the environment for computing-intensive 3D-rendering jobs derived from the ESPRIT project EROPPA and demonstrate that the new environment can change dramatically the character of the post production business.