Design and Deployment of a Network-aware Grid for e-Science Applications

In the last years, grid computing has emerged as a valuable service to solve complex computational problems in many scientific and industrial domains. Quality of Service (QoS) provision for these applications is therefore a key challenge for high speed Next Generation Networks and cross-layer mechanisms, enabling the development of network-aware grids, should be introduced. This paper takes into account, as a case study, an application for the simulation of particles coagulation phenomena. A parallel direct simulation Monte Carlo algorithm has been implemented and extensive computations have been performed in a cluster of computing nodes to evaluate the execution time of the application in different operating conditions. Then, data collected from these experiments, have been used as input for the design and deployment of a network-aware grid infrastructure. Since this application is characterized by frequent data exchanges, the impact of the allocated bandwidth on the overall application's performance has been investigated.