Superconcurrent simulation of polymer chains on heterogeneous networks

The authors present the results of an experiment on massively parallel stochastic simulation of polymer chains for measuring scale-invariant phenomena at critical temperatures. The parallelization is achieved through the EcliPSe toolkit and conducted on a flexible, tree-structured virtual machine made up of arbitrary and heterogeneous computing nodes dispersed across the country. These nodes cooperate to perform the simulation and pool results together in real time at a central node which initiates the parallel simulation. The advantage of the tree-structure is that it allows for a fault-resilient, flexible environment for long-running parallel simulations. The authors present results on sheer performance, price performance, and toolkit-based parallelization by monitoring the same computations on a CRAY Y-MP and making detailed comparisons. Most significant are the excellent price-performance ratios given by the heterogeneous computing environment