Abstract
Impact cratering is an important geological process of special interest in Astrobiology. Its numerical simulation comprises the execution of a high number of tasks, since the search space of input parameter values includes the projectile diameter, the water depth and the impactor velocity. Furthermore, the execution time of each task is not uniform because of the different numerical properties of each experimental configuration. Grid technology is a promising platform to execute this kind of applications, since it provides the end user with a performance much higher than that achievable on any single organization. However, the scheduling of each task on a Grid involves challenging issues due to the unpredictable and heterogeneous behavior of both the Grid and the numerical code. This paper evaluates the performance of a Grid infrastructure based on the Globus toolkit and the GridWay framework, which provides the adaptive and fault tolerance functionality required to harness Grid resources, in the simulation of the impact cratering process. The experiments have been performed on a testbed composed of resources shared by five sites interconnected by RedIRIS, the Spanish Research and Education Network.
Highlights
Impact cratering is an important geological process of special interest in Astrobiology that affects the surface of most celestial bodies such as planets and satellites
Our target application analyzes the threshold diameter for cratering the seafloor of a hypothetical martian sea during the first steps of an impact. Results of this analysis can be used to develop a search criteria for future investigations, including techniques that will be used in future Mars exploration missions to detect buried geological structures using ground penetrating radar surveys, as the ones included in the ESA Mars Express and planned for NASA 2005 missions
The suitability of a Grid environment based on the GridWay framework and the Globus toolkit has been demonstrated for the execution of a high throughput computing application that simulates impact cratering
Summary
Impact cratering is an important geological process of special interest in Astrobiology that affects the surface of most celestial bodies such as planets and satellites. Our target application analyzes the threshold diameter for cratering the seafloor of a hypothetical martian sea during the first steps of an impact Results of this analysis can be used to develop a search criteria for future investigations, including techniques that will be used in future Mars exploration missions to detect buried geological structures using ground penetrating radar surveys, as the ones included in the ESA Mars Express and planned for NASA 2005 missions. The discovery of marine-target impact craters on Mars would help to address the ongoing debate of whether large water bodies occupied the northern plains of Mars and help to constrain future paleoclimatic reconstructions [22] In any case, this kind of study requires a huge amount of computing power, which is not usually available within a single organization.
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