Cactus Application: Performance Predictions in Grid Environments

The Cactus software is representative for a whole class of scientific applications; typically those that are tightly coupled, have regular space decomposition, and huge memory and processor time requirements. Cactus proved to be a valuable tool for astrophysicists, who first initiated its development. However, today’s fastest supercomputers are not powerful enough to perform realistically large astrophysics simulations with Cactus. The emergence of innovative resource environments like Grids satisfies this need for computational power. Our paper addresses issues related to the execution of applications like Cactus in Grid environments. We focus on two types of Grids: a set of geographically distributed supercomputers and a collection of the scale of one million Internet-connected workstations. We study the application performance on traditional systems, validate the theoretical results against experimental data, and predict performance in the two new environments.