Grid-enabling FIRST: Speeding Up Simulation Applications Using WinGrid

The vision of grid computing is to make computational power, storage capacity, data and applications available to users as readily as electricity and other utilities. Grid infrastructures and applications have traditionally been geared towards dedicated, centralized, high performance clusters running on UNIX flavour operating systems (commonly referred to as cluster-based grid computing). This can be contrasted with desktop-based grid computing which refers to the aggregation of nondedicated, de-centralized, commodity PCs connected through a network and running (mostly) the Microsoft Windows operating system. Large scale adoption of such Windows-based grid infrastructure may be facilitated via grid-enabling existing Windows applications. This paper presents the WinGrid approach to grid enabling existing Windows- based Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs). Through the use of a case study developed in conjunction with Ford Motor Company, the paper demonstrates how experimentation with the CSP Witness and FIRST can achieve a linear speedup when WinGrid is used to harness idle PC computing resources. This, combined with the lessons learned from the case study, has encouraged us to develop the web service extensions to WinGrid. It is hoped that this would facilitate wider acceptance of WinGrid among enterprises having stringent security policies in place.