Development and Execution of an Impact Cratering Application on a Computational Grid

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