JASAG: A Gridification Tool for Agricultural Simulation Applications

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. Fil: Arroqui, Mauricio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Centro de Investigacion Veterinaria de Tandil; Argentina Fil: Rodríguez Alvarez, Juan Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Centro de Investigacion Veterinaria de Tandil; Argentina Fil: Vázquez, Hernán Ceferino. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; Argentina Fil: Machado, C.. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias; Argentina Fil: Mateos, C. Diaz, Cristian Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; Argentina Fil: Zunino Suarez, Alejandro Octavio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; Argentina