Benchmarking and adaptive load balancing of the virtual reactor application on the Russian-Dutch Grid

Abstract

This paper addresses a problem of porting a distributed parallel application to the Grid. As a case study we use the Virtual Reactor application on the Russian-Dutch Grid testbed. We sketch the Grid testbed infrastructure and application modular architecture, and concentrate on performance issues of one of the core parallel solvers on the Grid. We compare the performance achieved on homogeneous resources with that observed on heterogeneous computing and networking infrastructure. To increase the parallel efficiency of the solver on heterogeneous resources we developed an adaptive load balancing algorithm. We demonstrate the speedup achieved with this technique and indicate the ways to further enhance the algorithm and develop an automated procedure for optimal utilization of Grid resources for parallel computing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.