Speeding up simulation applications using WinGrid

Authors:
Navonil Mustafee;Simon J. E. Taylor
Affiliations:
Operational Research and Management Sciences Group, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, U.K.;Centre for Applied Simulation Modelling, School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, U.K.
Venue:
Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience - Distributed Simulation, Virtual Environments and Real-time Applications
Year:
2009

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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 that 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 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. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.