Elastic Apps Paper at CCGrid 2013

Dinesh Rajan will present his paper
Case Studies in Designing Elastic Applications at the IEEE International Conference on Clusters, Clouds, and Grids (CCGrid) in Delft, the Netherlands. This work was done in collaboration with Andrew Thrasher and Scott Emrich from the Notre Dame Bioinformatics Lab, and Badi Abdul-Wahid and Jesus Izaguirre from the Laboratory for Computational Life Sciences.

The paper describes our experience in designing three different elastic applications -- E-MAKER, Elastic Replica Exchange, and Folding at Work -- that run on hundreds to thousands of cores using the Work Queue framework. The paper offers six guidelines for designing similar applications:

1. Abolish shared writes.
   
2. Keep your software close and your dependencies closer.
   
3. Synchronize two, you make company; synchronize
   three, you make a crowd.
   
4. Make tasks of a feather flock together.
   
5. Seek simplicity, and gain power.
   
6. Build a model before scaling new heights.