Investigating grid computing technologies for use with commercial simulation packages

As simulation experimentation in industry become more computationally demanding, grid computing can be seen as a promising technology that has the potential to bind together the computational resources needed to quickly execute such simulations. To investigate how this might be possible, this paper reviews the grid technologies that can be used together with commercial-off-the-shelf simulation packages (CSPs) used in industry. The paper identifies two specific forms of grid computing (Public Resource Computing and Enterprise-wide Desktop Grid Computing) and the middleware associated with them (BOINC and Condor) as being suitable for grid-enabling existing CSPs. It further proposes three different CSP-grid integration approaches and identifies one of them to be the most appropriate. It is hoped that this research will encourage simulation practitioners to consider grid computing as a technologically viable means of executing CSP-based experiments faster.

[1]  Matt W. Mutka.  Estimating Capacity For Sharing in a Privately Owned Workstation Environment , 1992, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[2]  M. Lamanna.  The LHC computing grid project at CERN , 2004 .

[3]  M. Giesler,et al.  The Anthropology of File Sharing: Consuming Napster As a Gift , 2003 .

[4]  H. Casanova,et al.  ACM SIGACT news distributed computing column 8 , 2002, SIGA.

[5]  Daeyeon Park,et al.  A lightweight personal grid using a supernode network , 2003, Proceedings Third International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P2003).

[6]  Rajkumar Buyya,et al.  Alchemi: A .NET-based Enterprise Grid Computing System , 2005, International Conference on Internet Computing.

[7]  Michael Pidd,et al.  Simulation software: not the same yesterday, today or forever , 2006, J. Simulation.

[8]  Ian T. Foster,et al.  The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations , 2001, Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl..

[9]  Stefan Saroiu,et al.  A Measurement Study of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems , 2001 .

[10]  Arie Shoshani,et al.  The Earth System Grid: Supporting the Next Generation of Climate Modeling Research , 2005, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[11]  Brian W. Hollocks,et al.  Forty years of discrete-event simulation—a personal reflection , 2006, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[12]  Hector Garcia-Molina,et al.  Maximizing remote work in flooding-based peer-to-peer systems , 2003, Comput. Networks.

[13]  Ian T. Foster,et al.  Grid Services for Distributed System Integration , 2002, Computer.

[14]  Chong-Sun Hwang,et al.  Volunteer availability based fault tolerant scheduling mechanism in desktop grid computing environment , 2004, Third IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, 2004. (NCA 2004). Proceedings..

[15]  Douglas Thain,et al.  Distributed computing in practice: the Condor experience , 2005, Concurr. Pract. Exp..

[16]  Miron Livny,et al.  Condor-a hunter of idle workstations , 1988, [1988] Proceedings. The 8th International Conference on Distributed.

[17]  Marcel Kunze,et al.  Grid Computing in Europe: From Research to Deployment , 2005, ACSW.

[18]  Thomas A. Finholt,et al.  NEESGRID: A DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATORY FOR ADVANCED EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING EXPERIMENT AND SIMULATION , 2004 .

[19]  B. Allen,et al.  Designing a Runtime System for Volunteer Computing , 2006, ACM/IEEE SC 2006 Conference (SC'06).

[20]  Thomas N. Herzog,et al.  Applications of Monte Carlo Methods to Finance and Insurance , 2002 .

[21]  David P. Anderson,et al.  SETI@home: an experiment in public-resource computing , 2002, CACM.

[22]  Ju Wang,et al.  The entropia virtual machine for desktop grids , 2005, VEE '05.

[23]  Ami Marowka,et al.  The GRID: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure , 2000, Parallel Distributed Comput. Pract..

[24]  Rassul Ayani,et al.  Distributed Simulation : A Comparison of CMB and HLA Interoperability Approaches to Type I Interoperability Reference Model Problems , 2009 .

[25]  Carl Kesselman,et al.  Concepts and Architecture , 2004, The Grid 2, 2nd Edition.

[26]  David P. Anderson,et al.  BOINC: a system for public-resource computing and storage , 2004, Fifth IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing.

[27]  Stewart Robinson,et al.  Discrete-event simulation: from the pioneers to the present, what next? , 2005, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[28]  Anne E. Trefethen,et al.  The UK e-Science Core Programme and the Grid , 2002, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[29]  Andrew A. Chien,et al.  Entropia: architecture and performance of an enterprise desktop grid system , 2003, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[30]  Navonil Mustafee,et al.  A grid computing framework for commercial simulation packages , 2007 .

[31]  Nathaniel Good,et al.  Usability and privacy: a study of Kazaa P2P file-sharing , 2003, CHI '03.

[32]  Ian Foster,et al.  The Grid 2 - Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Second Edition , 1998, The Grid 2, 2nd Edition.

[33]  Rajkumar Buyya,et al.  Grids and Grid technologies for wide‐area distributed computing , 2002, Softw. Pract. Exp..

[34]  Simon J. E. Taylor,et al.  So where to next? A survey of the future for discrete-event simulation , 2006 .

[35]  Andrew A. Chien,et al.  Resource Management for Rapid Application Turnaround on Enterprise Desktop Grids , 2004, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE SC2004 Conference.

[36]  Rassul Ayani,et al.  A Comparison of CMB- and HLA-Based Approaches to Type I Interoperability Reference Model Problems for COTS-Based Distributed Simulation , 2005, Simul..