IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose, CA, USA
OptimalGrid represents a new style of middleware for computing large connected problems in a distributed computing environment. Previous techniques have employed the "toolkit" approach, where the application writers would manually parallelize their problems, employing the programming interface of a specific parallel or distributed system. OptimalGrid removes that burden from the programmer by automating the problem partitioning, the problem deployment, the runtime management and the dynamic rebalancing/redeployment of the problem in the event of faults or performance problems. With OptimalGrid, the programmer is responsible only for the description of the problem, the problem algorithm, and the data; the rest is handled by the middleware. In this talk I will describe the OptimalGrid system and I'll show two examples of its use. The first example uses OptimalGrid in a synchronous fashion to solve connected Finite Element Model problems. The second example uses OptimalGrid in an asynchronous fashion to support massively online player games over a variable set of game servers that grow or shrink in number depending on the number of users.