Peaks Detection in X-Ray Diffraction Profiles Using Grid Computing

X-Ray scattering techniques pose some problems for automatic peaks detection on diffraction profiles that can be interesting from a computational point of view. In this way, finding out the measure in which a model fits to an a priori known profile is an optimization problem needing the definition of a figure of merit, whose calculation involves a hard computing effort. A sequential algorithm exploring all the existing possibilities in the solution space of this problem surely would be discarded due to its cost in terms of execution time. Running this algorithm on a grid computing infrastructure helps to reduce a lot this effort and allows to show real results and to offer conclusions about the application of this recent distributed computing paradigm to scientific matters.