Usefulness of Virtual Private Networks for Mini-Grid Environments Demonstrated by Parallel Cellular Automata Simulation

The simulation of a technical system is an invaluable step in its design process. Cellular Automata (CA) present an accepted and widely used model for the simulation of a broad range of systems. They are a good fit for execution on cluster computers, due to the fact that CA simulations are quite compute-intensive and well parallelizable. At our university, we have several small-scale clusters on the campus which may be too small to handle some large simulations along. This is a typical situation for small to medium size research institutions or enterprises. In this paper, we discuss the coupling of several cluster computers using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to form a “Mini-Grid”. A simulation using CA serves as application example. We consider the restrictions under which this approach is feasible. The use of VPNs presents a lean alternative to more general, but also heavyweight Grid middleware solutions, and require significantly less effort to be set up. We present measurements which show that the coupling of clusters through a VPN provides enough communication performance for our application.