Linear algebra computation benchmarks on a model grid platform

The interest of the scientific community in Beowulf clusters and Grid computing infrastructures is continuously increasing. The present work reports on a customization of Globus Software Toolkit 2 for a Grid infrastructure based on Beowulf clusters, aimed at analyzing and optimizing its performance. We illustrate the platform topology and the strategy we adopted to implement the various levels of process communication based on Globus and MPI. Communication benchmarks and computational tests based on parallel linear algebra routines widely used in computational chemistry applications have been carried out on a model Grid infrastructure composed of three 3 Beowulf clusters connected through an ATM WAN (16 Mbps).