A comparison between a Computational Grid and a High-end Multicore Server in an academic environment

Abstract

This study compares a computational grid to a high-end multicore server in terms of pure performance and system management so as to establish the choices and trade-offs of using either of the two systems to provide academic researchers with high performance processing capacity whilst curbing underutilization of computing resources. We conducted an experiment by adapting a compute-intensive applications for processing on both systems and measured the job completion times of the application when executed on either of the systems. We recorded job completion times for every task ran on the two systems, these are used in our analysis of the results. The findings from this research suggest that the dedicated multicore server performs better than the grid in a case of pure performance and that the grid could be an alternative to the multicore server as it offers more benefits and computing resources than the multicore server. The findings offer insight to researchers in need of high performance processing and assists them in determining the best system to use for a specific scenario.