The SDSU online Chemical Equilibrium Services perform numerical heat transfer and fluid flow computations, using the Flame3D simulator, for thousands of researchers, educators, and students. The computation is broken down into a grid of 2D or 3D control volumes, each of which runs for a few seconds, has small memory requirements (100 Bytes), is independent of its neighbors, and is submitted individually to a Web Service. The embarrassingly parallel simulation requires several hours to compute a few thousand control volumes, for 10’s of thousands of iterations on a desktop. To improve the computational performance, a multi-task computing (MTC) approach was adopted. For this, a simple job distribution Web service framework (JODIS) was designed that distributes application workloads across hetergenous computing systems. JODIS has been demonstrated to run millions of Flame3D tasks simultaneously on a variety of resources and queuing systems. In this paper we report on the impact of JODIS on Flame3D computations, along with our experiences gained and challenges encountered when using heterogeneous computing environments, including the TeraGrid. Using JODIS, we have demonstrated a significant increase in the resolution of Flame3D (from 10 to more than 10 control volumes) and significant reduction in run times (by a factor of over 40 for a large test case of 128 processors and 10 tasks). In general, we conclude that the MTC approach can significantly improve Flame3D computational performance, but that changes need to be made to queuing/job submission systems in order to facilitate the rapid cycles needed for jobs similar to the Flame3D tasks.
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