| Paper (Cached copy) | Summary | Relation to thesis |
| Nimrod | Tool for Parametised Simulations on distributed systems | Similarities: Parametised Simulations on distributed computers. Differences: No active sampling. Designed for large, widely distributed computational systems, not clusters. Designed for fault tolerance, not interactivity. |
| Nimrod/O | Similar to Nimron, but with automatic optimisation. | Similarities: Guided search of design space. Differences: Not focused on interactivity - no consideration to partial results. The objective can only be expressed by a single objective functions. |
| Condor | A cooperating distributed batch system, deals with job planning scheduling and resource management. | Focuses on flexibility - emphasis is placed on dealing with volatility of computing resources. |
| Globus | Toolkit deployed on grid resources for automatic resource discovery and workflow scheduling. | It can be used for distributed parameter sweep applications, has a notion of dependence, but is targeted to widely distributed networks, with focus on discovery, data replication and fault tolerance, rather than interactivity. |
| NetSolve | Client-Server system to distribute computations over a network. | Addresses the issues of load balancing and resource management, but resource as fixed - i.e., each machine has a fixed number of processors, so the scheduler cannot choose to schedule a portion of a machine. |
| VI-Steering | Interactively steerable parameter sweep application | Similarties: user directed parameter space search on distributed computing resources. But interactivity is limited to the user specifying spaces of interest, rather than steering the entire study. I.e., VI uses a user as the sampler. |
| Paper (Cached copy) | Summary | Relation to thesis |
| Fine-grain dataflow thread scheduling | A simple model to describe fine-grain scheduling on multi-threaded multiprocessors | The scheduling of "quanta" provides way to model and schedule dataflow-based computation on distributed resources. But it does static analysis, i.e., all the pieces of the program has to be known before hand. |
| ICC++ | Heirarchical approach to load balancing threads on a distributed platform. Groups threads into subsets and load balance each independently. | Heirarchical approach simplifies the scheduling problem on a distributed platform, but requires user intervention to identify subsets and give scheduling policy for each subset. |
| Affinity Scheduling | Allow programmers to specify functions' affinity to tasks, objects, processors, and also allow programmers to specify how objects are distributed. | One way to express thread locality (via data and processor locality), but requires programmer intervension. |
| Paper (Cached copy) | Summary | Relation to thesis |
| Falcon | On-line monitoring and steering of large-scale parallel programs. | Devised a mechanism to monitor and steer running programs. But the system steers only one experiment at a time, rather than entire computational study. (Did not use because Falcon requires applications to be written in the CThreads package.) |
| Mirror Object Model | Model for monitoring and steering parallel programs. Object-centric view: Steering and monitoring are performed on objects states and methods placed in mirror objects (or stubs). | Provides one mechanism of steering and monitoring, but steers only one object at a time, rather than entire computational study. |
| Distributed Laboratories | Presents a multi-user steering platform. | Extends the Falcon work by adding two steering/monitoring mechanisms (synchronous and asynchronous); addresses issues of having multiple users - synchronisation of displays, interconnectivity, and data exchange. |
| SCIRun | Interactive computational steering environment using dataflow model. | Component-based infrastructure, but focused on the dataflow model and interactivity, and not targeted on distributed platform. |
| SCIRun | Same as above | Same as above |
| SCIRun Distributed | Enable SCIRun components to be run on distributed machines via stub. | Still focused on dataflow model, and not sure how scalable this is. |
| CUMULVUS | Infrastructure for steering, monitoring, and checkpointing. | Data-centric view: only parameters are steerable. Monitored and steered variables are declared in advance (using instrumentation code), along with data layout (for distributed objects). Merges visualisation and steering with checkpointing, since they require similar infrastructures. |
| CUMULVUS | CUMULVUS with collaborative analysis. | Same as above |
| UNITAH | Component-based Problem Solving Environment on distributed platforms | Use CCA components on the SCIRun dataflow model. Interoperability via adapter components and Nexus communication layer. Supports distributed components. Requires external steering-aware runtime environment. |
| DISCOVER | Web-based collaborative problem solving environment, allows online steering and monitoring of experiments through the web. | Leverage Web-based technology to construct control and monitoring network. |
| CSE | Steering and monitoring of computational processes on remote computers. | Data-centric in that all operations between the simulation and the user are based on data. But the data are functionally grouped together using Satellites. |
| RealityGrid | Steering and monitoring on remote computers | Steering library is seperate. Also Data centric - all changes are done via changes in parameter values. Added notion of using checkpoints to support rewinding. Also depends on external runtime environment, in this case Open Grid Services Infrastructure. |
| RealityGrid | Same as above | Same as above. |
| WEDS | Lightweight wed service-based middleware focused on transparency: All-in-one middleware to handle job submission, steering, visualisation and workflow manipulation. | Based on WSRF services. |
| GVIZ | Visualisation middleware | Focuses on visualisation. Also web-based, parameters are sent via XML and SOAP (eventually, using Unix socket calls as of 2003). |
| SCIRUN2 | Workflow-based CCA Problem Solving Environment. | Ideally, pieces of SimX will be transformed into components in SCIRun2 to enable reuse and quick construction of steerable studies. |
| CCA | Standard interface for Components used in High-Performance Scientific Computing | Same as above |
| CBPS | Summary of SCIRun, BioPSE, and Unitah | See SCIRun, BioPSE, and Unitah |