Abstract
High performance application development remains challenging, particularly for
scientists making the transition to a Grid environment. In general areas of
computing, virtual environments such as Java and .Net have proved successful in
fostering application development. Unfortunately, these existing virtual
environments do not provide the necessary high performance computing
abstractions required by e-Scientists. In response, we propose and demonstrate a
new approach to the development of a high performance virtual infrastructure:
Motor is a virtual machine developed by integrating a high performance message
passing library directly within a virtual infrastructure. Motor provides high
performance application developers with a common runtime, garbage collection and
system libraries, including high performance message passing, whilst retaining
strong message passing performance.