Vortrag George Cybenko, 10.9.98, 17.15 Uhr

[Peter Brezany]

                          UNIVERSITAET WIEN 
          INSTITUT FUER SOFTWARETECHNIK UND PARALLELE SYSTEME
                            gemeinsam mit 
                                VCPC 
           EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR PARALLEL COMPUTING AT VIENNA 


      EINLADUNG ZU EINEM VORTRAG IM RAHMEN DES INSTITUTS-KOLLOQUIUMS:
                

         
                  Mobile Agents and Scientific Computing
                  --------------------------------------
                   
			    Prof. Dr. George Cybenko
				Dartmouth College
				Hanover, NH USA
      
 		               
                ZEIT: Donnerstag, 10. 9. 1998, 17:15 s.t 
                                             
                                             
        ORT: Institut fuer Softwaretechnik und Parallele Systeme
                  1090 Wien, Liechtensteinstrasse 22, 
                         Seminarraum, Mezzanin


Abstract

Mobile agents are programs that can migrate within
a network of heterogeneous computers, carrying
state information with them.  Mobile agents, and mobile
code more generally, can be viewed as the next technical
step beyond distributed and parallel computing.

Mobile agents are motivated by the fact that they hold promise
for solving several distributed computing problems.  By moving
code to data, the movement of large datasets can be eliminated
if the required results are easy to compute and small relative
to the original dataset.  This capability addresses performance in
networked computing in a way than MPI and other paradigms can not.

Additionally, mobile agents are typically not compiled but interpreted or
executed under a virtual machine, such as for TCL and Java agents.
This allows new types of heterogeneous computing to be deployed.

Perhaps most importantly, mobile agents allow new types of
asynchronous, heterogeneous simulations to be contemplated and
designed.  To this end, we introduce the concept of a "data and
simulation cloud" which is a distributed collection of dynamically
changing data and computing resources.  Simulations can join and
leave this cloud, contributing new information sources and using
available datasets in dynamic, nondeterministic ways.

Mobile agents make such simulations feasible and efficient by
allowing programs to migrate to network locations that contain
the data resources without predefining the relationships between
programs at compile time.

This talk will present  the basic technologies underlying mobile agents,
focusing on a specific implementation, D'Agents (see
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~agent/).  Several key technical
challenges in developing a mobile code system include security,
efficiency, naming conventions, and mobility management.
The D'Agent solutions to these problems will be presented.