Large-scale distributed computational fluid dynamics on the information power grid using Globus

This paper describes an experiment in which a large-scale scientific application developed for tightly-coupled parallel machines is adapted to the distributed execution environment of the Information Power Grid (IPG). A brief overview of the IPG and a description of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) algorithm are given. The Globus metacomputing toolkit is used as the enabling device for the geographically-distributed computation. Modifications related to latency hiding and load balancing were required for an efficient implementation of the CFD application in the IPG environment. Performance results on a pair of SGI Origin 2000 machines indicate that real scientific applications can be effectively implemented on the IPG; however; a significant amount of continued effort is required to make such an environment useful and accessible to scientists and engineers.