Using TOP-C and AMPIC to port large parallel applications to the Computational Grid

摘要

Porting large parallel applications to new and various distributed computing platforms is a challenging task from a software engineering perspective. The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the development time to port very large applications to the Computational Grid can be significantly reduced. TOP-C and AMPIC are software packages that have each seen successful applications in their respective domains of parallel computing and process creation/communication over the Computational Grid. We combined the two packages in 1 man-week, thereby leveraging several man-years of previous independent software development. As a real world test case, the 1,000,000 line Geant4 sequential application was then deployed over the Computational Grid in 3 man-weeks by using TOP-C/AMPIC. The cluster parallelization of Geant4 using TOP-C is now included as part of the Geant4 4.1 distribution, and the integration of TOP-C/AMPIC and the Globus protocols will additionally enable the use of the fundamental Grid middleware services in the future.