Bringing metacomputing to Scilab

Scilab, developed at INRIA in the Meta2 project, is a software similar to Matlab that allows scientific applications to be developed using an interactive environment on a workstation running Unix or Windows. In this paper, we present the current version of Scilab //, a extension of this software that supports the execution of parallel jobs within Scilab. Using simple commands and the same interface as Scilab, Scilab_{// allows users to start Scilab on a parallel machine or a network of workstations, therefore giving access to the computation power and huge aggregate memory sizes. From the Scilab interactive environment, users can spawn several other Scilab processes, executing remote Scilab scripts, which can then communicate between each other. Finally, processes can print/plot their results. There are many research directions around this project and we give an overview of the current and future developments}