Cactus Tools for Grid Applications

  • Authors:

  • Gabrielle Allen;Werner Benger;Thomas Dramlitsch;Tom Goodale;Hans-Christian Hege;Gerd Lanfermann;André Merzky;Thomas Radke;Edward Seidel;John Shalf

  • Affiliations:

  • Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut (AEI), Golm, Germany;Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut (AEI), Golm, Germany, Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik (ZIB), Berlin, Germany;Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut (AEI), Golm, Germany;Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut (AEI), Golm, Germany;Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik (ZIB), Berlin, Germany;Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut (AEI), Golm, Germany;Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik (ZIB), Berlin, Germany;Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut (AEI), Golm, Germany;Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut (AEI), Golm, Germany, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Champaign, IL, USA;National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Champaign, IL, USA, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Cluster Computing
  • Year:
  • 2001

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Cactus is an open source problem solving environment designed for scientists and engineers. Its modular structure facilitates parallel computation across different architectures and collaborative code development between different groups. The Cactus Code originated in the academic research community, where it has been developed and used over many years by a large international collaboration of physicists and computational scientists. We discuss here how the intensive computing requirements of physics applications now using the Cactus Code encourage the use of distributed and metacomputing, and detail how its design makes it an ideal application test-bed for Grid computing. We describe the development of tools, and the experiments which have already been performed in a Grid environment with Cactus, including distributed simulations, remote monitoring and steering, and data handling and visualization. Finally, we discuss how Grid portals, such as those already developed for Cactus, will open the door to global computing resources for scientific users.