AMROEBA: Computational astrophysics modeling enabled by dynamic lambda switching

Many data and compute intensive Grid applications, such as computational astrophysics, may be able to benefit from networking supported by dynamically provisioned lightpaths. To date, the majority of high performance distributed environments have been based on traditional routed packet networks, provisioned as external services rather than as integrated components within those environments. Because this approach often cannot provide high performance capabilities required by these applications, an alternative distributed infrastructure architecture is being designed based on dynamic lightpaths, supported by optical networks. These designs implement communication services and infrastructure as integral components of distributed infrastructure. The resultant environments resemble large scale specialized instruments. Presented here is one such architecture, implemented on a wide-area, optical Grid test bed, featuring a closely integrated dedicated lightpath mesh. The test bed was used to conduct a series of experiments to explore its potential for supporting adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) astrophysics simulations. While preliminary, the results of these experiments indicate that this architecture may provide the deterministic capabilities required by a wide range of high performance distributed services and applications, especially for computational science.