Bridging the High Performance Computing Gap: the OurGrid Experience

High performance computing is currently not affordable for those users that cannot rely on having a highly qualified computing support team. To cater for these users' needs we have proposed, implemented and deployed OurGrid. OurGrid is a peer-to-peer grid middleware that supports the automatic creation of large computational grids for the execution of embarrassingly parallel applications. It has been used to support the OurGrid Community - a public free-to-join grid that is in production since December 2004. In this paper we show how the OurGrid Community has been used to support the execution of a number of applications. Further we discuss the main benefits brought up by the system and the difficulties that have been faced by the system developers and the users and managers of the OurGrid Community.