Over the past several years, we have developed a specialized
parametric modelling system called
Nimrod.
Nimrod uses a simple declarative parametric modelling language
to express a parametric experiment and provides machinery that
automates the task of formulating, running, monitoring, and
collating the results from the multiple individual experiments.
Equally important, Nimrod incorporates a distributed scheduling
component that can manage the scheduling of individual experiments
to idle computers in a local area network. Together, these features
mean that even complex parametric experiments can be defined
and run with little programmer effort. In many cases it is possible
to establish a new experiment in minutes. Nimrod has been applied
to a range of application areas, including Bioinformatics, Operations
Research, Network Simulation, Electronic CAD, Ecological Modelling
and Business Process Simulation.
EnFuzion is a commercial version of the research system Nimrod.
Nimrod/G is a "Grid aware" version of Nimrod built
on the
Globus
toolkit. It exploits an understanding of its problem domain
as well as the nature of the computational Grid to provide a
high level interface to the user. Specifically, it provides
transparent access to the computational resources, and implements
user level scheduling. Nimrod/L is a version of Nimrod/G that
runs on the
Legion
toolkit.
Nimrod/O
is an extension to Nimrod that augments the distributed parameter
sweep functionality of Nimrod with automatic optimization.
ActiveSheets builds on Nimrod by adding a component based spread
sheet interface for specifying computational experiments. We have
chosen to use Microsoft Excel as the base spreadsheet application,
and have used VBA and associated component technology to allow
ActiveSheets to interface with Nimrod/G.
Contact Point:
David Abramson
Phone 03 9905 1183
Email
davida@csse.monash.edu.au
Staff:
David Abramson - Monash
Slavisa Garic - DSTC
Jagan Kommineni - Monash Post Graduate
Colin Endicott - DSTC
