Management of a parameter sweep for scientific applications on cluster environments
The GEOsciences Network (GEON, www.geongrid.org) is a large-scale collaborative cyberinfrastructure project involving information technology and geoscience researchers from multiple institutions. The GEON infrastructure provides portal, middleware, and data resources to facilitate scientific discovery for domain scientists using applications, tools, and services. It consists of both a service-orientedWeb/Grid framework and application toolkits, using the Web service and portlet programming model to represent applications. Based on those grid environments, we have developed the SYNSEIS (SYNthetic SEISmogram) tool within the GEON infrastructure to support personalized experiments in seismology. In this paper, we present an overview of SYNSEIS from a user point of view, and demonstrate how one can use a simple management scheme to perform a parameter sweep and distribute the work in computational resources, using a scientific application that was not specifically designed to perform parameter sweeps. The performance advantages to be gained by using this scheme with scientific codes for dealing with a large number of jobs on computational grids are very substantial. In particular, we identify the earthquake simulations in the SYNSEIS tool as an example application that can benefit from running jobs on computational resources and subsequently promote the sharing of computational resources among partner sites involved in the GEON project. Finally, we also discuss the parallel scaling behavior of our primary earthquake simulation application. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
parameter sweep web services grid computing earthquake modeling simulation