HMCS-G (Grid-enabled Heterogeneous Multi-Computer System for Gravity) 1.1 Trial Kit
General Documents
Table of Contents
Links to other contents
Welcome to HMCS-G 1.1 Trial Kit! This kit contains client library for
HMCS-G, documents and sample program to use it. HMCS-G is an environment
for hybrid computing with general purpose and special purpose machines
for astrophysics computation. With this trial kit, you can access GRAPE-6,
the world fastest gravity calculation engine, which is installed at Center for Computational Physics,
University of Tsukuba, Japan with very simple registration and
without any charge.
CAUTION: GRAPE-6 system is originally developed
by University of Tokyo. GRAPE-6 which can be accessed in HMCS-G and this
trial kit is installed at Center for Computational
Physics, University of Tsukuba and supported by HMCS-G research
team at the center. You cannot access GRAPE-6 system at University of
Tokyo in HMCS-G environment.
There are two classes of machines in HMCS-G environment. The first one
is a general purpose machine for any calculation except gravity, such as
Linux PC, cluster, MPP or vector machine. Another one is the special
gravity engine, GRAPE-6. These two systems communicate via OmniRPC,
which is a Grid-RPC system, to send the gravity calculation request and
receive its result.
On HMCS-G, GRAPE-6 server provides very high computational power on a
set of given particles up to 500,000 for complete N-body gravity
calculation which requires O(N2) computation. You can use the
system not only just for gravity calculation but also for combining your
algorithm including gravity calculation. For example, if you want to
simulate a system with a combination of hydrodynamics and gravity
calculation, run a program for hydrodynamics on your own machine (as a
general purpose side) and call a request of gravity calculation to
GRAPE-6 in that program with HMCS-G client API (Application Programming
Interface).
Currently, we support the API routines of HMCS-G clients written in C
language. However, if you describe some wrapping function which calls
our API routines indirectly, you can use this service in any language
you want such as Fortran.
What's OmniRPC
To use HMCS-G trial kit, you have to install
OmniRPC at first. (The installation kit of OmniRPC is also
included in this CD-ROM.)
OmniRPC is a
grid-RPC which enables Remote Procedure Call across different sites
without sharing account information. For the authentication of access
permission of service, both Globus and SSH are supported by OmniRPC.
This trial kit only supports SSH authentication.
A special account to access HMCS-G server is given for trial use with
this kit.
Supported System
This trial kit only support Linux. However, all functions of API are
very simple and it can be ported easily where OmniRPC is available.
We officially support the following operating system:
Linux RedHat 8.0 or higher version
We are sorry but we cannot answer to any question for porting HMCS-G
client API to other operating systems.
Terms and Conditions
- HMCS-G client API is copyrighted by Center for Computational
Physics, University of Tsukuba. You can use this library for any
research purpose except business usage.
- HMCS-G client API has no warranty for the environment of usage nor
the result of computation. We do not guarantee the correctness of any
computation result provided by GRAPE-6 server and HMCS-G system. The user
is responsible to all calculation result using HMCS-G environment.
- Center for Computational Physics, University of Tsukuba, has a right
to stop the service of HMCS-G trial usage at any time without
notification to registered and non-registered users.
- If we find any network inconvenience such as port scanning, DoS
attack, etc., we may stop the service to the host which tried the
attack, without notification.
Contact us
If you have any problem, question or comment, please contact us:
hmcs-service@ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp
The official home page of HMCS-G project is:
http://www.ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp/people/Research/HMCSG/
Last Update: November 7th, 2005
HMCS-G Research Team: Taisuke Boku (taisuke@cs.tsukuba.ac.jp)