Development and Performance Analysis of a Simulation-Optimization Framework on

A Large Scale Simulation Optimization (LASSO) framework is being developed by the authors. Linux clusters are the target platform for the framework, specifically cluster resources on the NSF TeraGrid. The framework is designed in a modular fashion that simplifies coupling with simulation model executables, allowing application of simulation optimization approaches across problem domains. In this paper the LASSO framework is coupled with a parallel groundwater transport simulation model. The performance of the LASSO framework is measured using a source history reconstruction problem and benchmarked against an existing MPI based implementation developed previously. Performance results indicate that communication overhead in the LASSO framework is contributing significantly to wall times. The authors purpose and will conduct several performance optimizations designed to ameliorate the problem.