Alan Karp

E-Services - Does it Mean Anything for High-Performance Computing


E-speak started as a research project at HP Labs with a very modest goal - to change the way the world thinks about computing. Today, we think about computing as the hardware we buy and the software we install on it. E-speak is about thinking of computing as a set of services that you enlist as you need them.

This dramatic shift is enabled by e-speak, an operating environment for the Internet. Almost, but not quite, an operating system, e-speak provides the access control and virtualization of an operating system while preserving the independent control of machines in the environment.
Clearly, such a platform can be used for any form of distributed computing. Most interestingly, it provides a platform for metacomputing, where a single application is distributed across the computing resources of a number of organizations. E-speak takes care of the problems of naming, discovery, management, and security freeing providers of these resources from dealing with these issues.

This talk will describe the requirements that led to the various features of the e-speak architecture as well as its key abstractions.