Inexpensive computing environments for compute-intensive applications

Small organizations such as local governments would clearly benefit from running simulations prior to making policy decisions. While many of the modeling applications that run such simulations are becoming available in the public domain, the computing resources and expertise to effectively run these impose financial constraints too great for local governments. In this paper, we articulate those requirements and hypothesize that it may be possible to build inexpensive distributed computing environments that would use the "null cycles", i.e., currently idle time, on an organization's local area network of personal computers. We describe how to configure one such environment with public domain software (PVM) on machines running Windows 2000, and what in general needs to be done to retrofit an existing modeling application to run in that environment. Finally, we present findings from a project to demonstrate the feasibility of using a distributed network of Windows 2000 machines for a typical environmental simulation used by Washington State's King County Department of Natural Resources.