Large Scale Computations on Grids

Abstract

The first Workshop on Large Scale Computations on Grids (LaSCoG'05) took place in Poznan, Poland, in conjunction with Sixth International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM 2005). It was devoted to various aspects of developing, analyzing and executing large-scale applications on computational grids including large-scale algorithms, symbolic and numeric computations, data models for large-scale applications, science portals, data visualization, performance analysis, evaluation and prediction.

The LaSCoG'05 Organizing Committee received nine submissions and after refereeing six of them were accepted for presentation during the Workshop and published in the Proceedings of PPAM 2005 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 3911). However, these papers were limited to eight pages, thus we decided to publish extended versions of the contributions. Finally, four papers were selected for publication in this special issue of the journal Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience:

• A Web Computing Environment for Parallel Algorithms in Java, by O. Bonorden, J. Gehweiler and F. Meyer auf der Heide;
• Mathematical Service Discovery: Architecture, Implementation and Performance, by S. A. Ludwig, O. F. Rana, W. Naylor and J. Padget;
• Benchmarking of a Joint IRISGrid/EGEE Testbed with a Bioinformatics Application, by J. Herrera, E. Huedo, R. S. Montero and I. M. Llorente;
• Heuristic Load Balancing for CFD Codes Executed in Heterogeneous Computing Environments, by D. Petcu, D. Vizman and M. Paprzycki.

Sometimes one can hear (or read) that grid computing is not enough of a scientific discipline and practical developments should be widely supported by more theoretical research. The extended versions of the LaSCoG papers selected for publications in this special issue can be considered as fine examples of such theoretical studies. The authors applied some formal methods as research techniques and obtained very interesting results from both practical and theoretical point of view.

PrzemysÅaw StpiczyÅski
Maria Curie-Sklodowska University
Poland