Metacomputing in a high performance computing center

The High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) is operating a number of supercomputers together with industry. This has led to the creation of a computing and networking environment that is unique in Europe for its variety and capability. Providing supercomputing capacity to both research and industry the HLRS has faced the need of offering not only seamless access to single computers. There is also a growing interest in coupling of applications that can best be done on coupled computing systems. Out of that need HLRS has developed a number of tools that support distributed computing and metacomputing in various ways. In addition the HLRS is involved in a number of projects that foster metacomputing. This paper summarizes the activities of the HLRS in the field of metacomputing. Its focus is on a concept for metacomputing in engineering applications. In order to overcome the problem of communication in distributed supercomputers special software PACX-MPI was developed. The package is used in several projects, both in industrial and research environments. Some promising results are available so far which were achieved during Supercomputing´99 in Portland/Oregon. The ever more important visualization of results is handled by COVISE, a package developed at HLRS for collaborative visualization and computing