Launcher
Lucas A. Wilson, John M. Fonner · 2014
Petascale computing systems have enabled tremendous advances for traditional simulation and modeling algorithms that are built around parallel execution. Unfortunately, scientific domains using data-oriented or high-throughput paradigms have difficulty taking full advantage of these resources without custom software development. This paper describes our solution for rapidly developing parallel parametric studies using sequential or threaded tasks: The launcher. We detail how to get ensembles executing quickly through common job schedulers SGE and SLURM, and the various user-customizable options that the launcher provides. We illustrate the efficiency of or tool by presenting execution results at large scale (over 65,000 cores) for varying workloads, including a virtual screening workload with indeterminate runtimes using the drug docking software Autodock Vina.