A parallel code for the analysis of light curves of close binary stars with surface inhomogeneities through the Astrocomp-grid portal

We present a parallel code for the analysis of sequences of light curves of magnetically active close binaries with brightness inhomogeneities on the surfaces of their component stars. The procedure allows us to search for the best values of the photometric parameters of the binary system as well as to obtain maps of the brightness inhomogeneities regularized by means of the Maximum Entropy and Tikhonov methods. The large amount of computational work is managed by means of a parallel application based on MPI. The code has been made available through the web-based portal Astrocomp (http://www.astrocomp.it) that allows a registered remote user to run it on a set of high-performance computing resources in a completely transparent manner.