Experience with on-demand physics simulations on the Sun Microsystems computing facility (SunGrid) at network.com
J. Lauret, M. Potekhin, Gabriele Carcassi, Albert Shamash, R Valia · Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2008
The simulation program of the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (Brookhaven National Laboratory) is growing in scope and its responsiveness to the needs of the research community. In addition, there is a significant ongoing R&D activity focused on future upgrades of the STAR detector, which also requires extensive simulations support. In addition to the local computing facility, the Open Science Grid (OSG) resources have been successfully used in STAR. However, the explosive growth of both computational needs and the available computing power, combined with distributed nature of the latter, dictate that all available options are considered - from open source to commercial grids. The computing facility of Sun Microsystems (the SunGrid) aims to deliver enterprise computing power and resources over the Internet, enabling developers, researchers, scientists and businesses to optimize performance and speed time to results without investment in IT infrastructure.