Metacomputing to Overcome the Power Limits of a Single Machine

There are problems in Science and Engineering which require a higher computing power than that currently available on a single machine. To overcome this limit it may be possible to exploit the aggregate capabilities of several computers (metacomputing). In a metacomputer, machines of different power (PCs, workstations, parallel computers, etc.) are linked together and used as a single powerful computer. As a case study, a quantum dynamics application concerned with the integration of a time-independent Schroedinger equation is considered for parallelization on a metacomputer. Vector and parallel versions of this application have already been implemented on a vector multiprocessor and on an nCUBE 2 and an IBM SP2 parallel systems. To further increase the dimensionality of the problem however, we cannot rely on the insufficient computing power of the above mentioned machines. To overcome these limits we have restructured the RIOS application so that it can run on a metacomputer consisting of three different platforms linked by a local area network.