Advanced Environments and Tools for High Performance Computing

Abstract

After an informal definition of the term "Problem Solving Environment" the importance of their development for many application areas is outlined. Over the five years that have passed since the original proposal for this conference series was written, clear changes in topics and application areas can be observed: While at the first meeting the focus was on software packages for the solution of whole problem classes without the requirement of detailed programming by the end user (through specification languages, recommender systems), and self-contained application packages, distributed computing was still the domain of CORBA and stand-alone systems. Since then, Grid technology has revolutionized the whole area. As a result, at this conference most presentations deal with Grid technology in some way or other. While in the beginning Grid computing was mainly used for the resource management of distributed systems, the recent standardization efforts of protocols and service architectures provide the opportunity to build powerful Problem Solving Environments from services available over the Grid. This presentation gives an overview of the current state of the art and tries to separate the achievements made from the "Grid hype" that can be seen today.