JASAG: a gridification tool for agricultural simulation applications. (28th November 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Arroqui, M.; Alvarez, J. Rodriguez; Vazquez, H.; Machado, C.; Mateos, C.; Zunino, A.
• Is Part Of: Concurrency and computation. Volume 27:Number 17(2015:Dec.)
• Page Start: 4716
• Page End: 4740
• Publication Date: 2014-11-28
• Subjects: agricultural simulation -- Grid Computing -- gridification; Parallel processing (Electronic computers) -- Periodicals; Parallel computers -- Periodicals; 004.35
• DOI: 10.1002/cpe.3453
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1532-0626

Abstract

Summary: The Grid Computing paradigm aims to create a 'virtual' and powerful single computer with many distributed resources to solve resource intensive problems. The term 'gridification' involves the process of transforming a conventional application to run in a Grid environment. In that sense, the more automatic this process is, the easier is for developers with low expertise in parallel and distributed computing to take advantage of these resources. To date, many semiautomatic gridifiers were built to support different gridification approaches and application code structures or anatomies. Furthermore, agricultural simulation applications have a particular common anatomy based on biophysical entities, such as animals, crops, and pastures, which are updated by actions, such as growing animals, growing crops, and growing pastures, along simulation execution. However, this anatomy is not fully supported by any of the existing gridifiers. Thus, this paper presents Agricultural Simulation Applications Gridifier (ASAG), a method for easy gridification of agricultural simulation applications, and its Java implementation, named Java ASAG (JASAG). The main design drivers of JASAG are middleware independence, separation of business logic and Grid behavior, and performance increase. An experimental evaluation showing the feasibility of the gridification method and its implementation is also reported, which resulted in speedups of up to 25 by using a real agricultural simulation application. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.