Complex system simulations with QosCosGrid

Abstract

The aim of the QosCosGrid project is to bring supercomputer-like performance and structure to cross-cluster computations. To support parallel complex systems simulations, QosCosGrid provides six reusable templates that may be instantiated with simulation-specific code to help with developing parallel applications using the ProActive Java library. The templates include static and dynamic graphs, cellular automata and mobile agents. In this work, we show that little performance is lost when a ProActive cellular automata simulation is executed across two distant administrative domains. We describe the middleware developed in the QosCosGrid project, which provides advance reservation and resource co-allocation functionality as well as support for parallel applications based on OpenMPI (for C/C++ and Fortran) or ProActive for Java. In particular, we describe how we modified ProActive Java to enable inter- cluster communication through firewalls. The bulk of the QosCosGrid software is available in open source from the QosCosGrid project website: www.qoscosgrid.org. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.