Speeding up simulation applications using WinGrid

Abstract

The vision of grid computing is to make computational power, storage capacity, data and applications available to users as readily as electricity and other utilities. Grid infrastructures and applications have traditionally been geared towards dedicated, centralized, high performance clusters running on UNIX “flavour” operating systems (commonly referred to as cluster-based grid computing). This can be contrasted with desktop-based grid computing which refers to the aggregation of non-dedicated, de-centralized, commodity PCs connected through a network and running (mostly) the Microsoft Windows operating system. Large scale adoption of such Windows-based grid infrastructure may be facilitated via grid-enabling existing Windows applications. This paper presents the WinGrid approach to grid enabling existing Windows-based Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs). Through the use of two case studies developed in conjunction with a major automotive company and a leading investment bank respectively, the contribution of this paper is the demonstration of how experimentation with the CSP Witness (Lanner Group) and the CSP Analytics (SunGard Corporation) can achieve speedup when using WinGrid middleware on both dedicated and non-dedicated grid nodes. It is hoped that this research would facilitate wider acceptance of desktop grid computing among enterprises interested in a low-intervention technological solution to speeding up their existing simulations.