An Aspect-Oriented Approach for Disaster Prevention Simulation Workflows on Supercomputers, Clusters, and Grids

Computer simulation is an important factor intoday’s disaster prevention procedures. Simulation codes assessthe evolution and impact of various physical phenomena indomains such as nuclear and environmental sciences, andultimately help saving lives. However, new and more computationallydemanding models, and new regulations for personneltraining have increased the demand for computational power.While the existing simulation codes can be ported to computingenvironments that can meet the new demand, suchas supercomputers, clusters, and grids, it is too expensiveand time-consuming to rewrite and re-certify them. Instead,in this work we propose an aspect-oriented approach thattakes existing simulation functionality and combines it withfunctionality required to run the simulation on different computingenvironments transparently to the simulation developer.Through experiments in the DAS-3 multi-cluster grid we showthat our approach increases the reusability, the maintainability,the scalability, and the robustness of a real disaster preventionsimulation, while incurring a low performance overhead.