The European meta computing utilising integrated broadband communications (E=MC(2)) project

Access to high performance computing resources could be of enormous benefit to many applications areas. Developments in network technologies, for example Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), offer the possibility of combining widely distributed HPC resources to address grand challenge problems and also to provide a brokerage service to a large and dispersed (i.e. European) user base requiring cost effective access to smaller amounts of HPC resources. The E=MC(2) project is running trial applications across widely distributed HPC resources via the European ATM pilot network. The project has shown that, while broadband wide area ATM networks still exhibit significantly high latencies, distributed high performance computing can be achieved and that there is a case for developing the commercial infrastructure to support it.