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Abstract : |
Concurrent computing on networked collections of computer systems is rapidly evolving into a viable technology that is attractive from the economic, performance, and availability perspectives. Several software infrastructures that support such heterogeneous network-based concurrent computing have evolved, and are in use for productionquality high-performance computing. In this paper, we describe such a system, and present our experiences with its use for massively concurrent computing in the application domain of polymer physics. The application involves stochastic simulation of polymer chains for measuring scale-invariant phenomena at critical disorder. The parallelization is achieved through the EcliPSe toolkit, and conducted on a flexible, treestructured virtual machine made up of arbitrary and heterogeneous computing nodes dispersed across the country. These nodes cooperate to perform the simulation and pool results together in real time at a central node which initiates the parallel simulation. The advantage of the tree-structure is that it allows for a fault-resilient, flexible environment for long-runing parallel simulations. We present results on sheer performance, price-performance, and toolkit-based parallelization by monitoring the same computations on a CRAY Y-MP and making detailed comparisons. Most significant are the excellent price-performance ratios given by the heterogeneous computing environment., |
