Affiliations: Laboratorio de Computación Avanzada,
Simulación, y Aplicaciones Telemáticas, Centro de
Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA), 28850 Torrejón de Ardoz, Spain | Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores, y
Automática, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de
Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain | Departamento de Matemática Aplicada, Facultad
de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid,
Spain
Abstract: Impact cratering is an important geological process of special
interest in Astrobiology. Its numerical simulation comprises the execution of a
high number of tasks, since the search space of input parameter values includes
the projectile diameter, the water depth and the impactor velocity.
Furthermore, the execution time of each task is not uniform because of the
different numerical properties of each experimental configuration. Grid
technology is a promising platform to execute this kind of applications, since
it provides the end user with a performance much higher than that achievable on
any single organization. However, the scheduling of each task on a Grid
involves challenging issues due to the unpredictable and heterogeneous behavior
of both the Grid and the numerical code. This paper evaluates the performance
of a Grid infrastructure based on the Globus toolkit and the GridWay framework,
which provides the adaptive and fault tolerance functionality required to
harness Grid resources, in the simulation of the impact cratering process. The
experiments have been performed on a testbed composed of resources shared by
five sites interconnected by RedIRIS, the Spanish Research and Education
Network.
