A software tool for semi-automatic gridification of resource-intensive Java bytecodes and its application to ray tracing and sequence alignment

Abstract

Computational Grids deliver the necessary computational infrastructure to perform resource-intensive computations such as the ones that solve the problems scientists are facing today. Exploiting Computational Grids comes at the expense of explicitly adapting the ordinary software implementing scientific problems to take advantage of Grid resources, which unavoidably requires knowledge on Grid programming. The recent notion of "gridifying" ordinary applications, which is based on semi-automatically deriving a Grid-aware version from the compiled code of a sequential application, promises users to be relieved from the requirement of manual usage of Grid APIs within their source codes. In this paper, we describe a novel gridification tool that allows users to easily parallelize Java applications on Grids. Extensive experiments with two real-world applications - ray tracing and sequence alignment - suggest that our approach provides a convenient balance between ease of gridification and Grid resource exploitation compared to manually using Grid APIs for gridifying ordinary applications.