Building Mini-Grid Environments with Virtual Private Networks: A Pragmatic Approach

At our university, we have a number of small-to-medium-size compute clusters and some technical simulations which could benefit from using several of these clusters simultaneously. To reach this goal, we discuss the formation of a "mini-grid" using a virtual private network to couple clusters on the message-passing level. This is a simple and pragmatic approach for those cases where the functionality (and complexity) of full grid middleware stacks is not strictly necessary. We evaluate the performance of our approach with a cellular automata simulation using MPI. Experiments show that the use of a VPN offers sufficient communication performance for our application example