Simulation post-processing on the Grid

Abstract: An AstroGrid-D project is outlined which consists of grid-enabling the on-demand post-processing of the output data from cosmological simulations, in particular the 25 Terabyte Millenium Simulation run of the Virgo consortium. Up to 105 files with a total size of 0.2 to 1 Terabyte need to be managed in a single post-processing workflow comprising about half a dozen individual stages. The grid-enabled Process Coordinator (ProC) scientific workflow engine shall be used for the design and execution of post-processing workflows. In addition to simulation post-processing, the GADGET-2 simulation code itself shall be invokable on demand. Background The cosmological simulation code GADGET-2 is a new massively parallel TreeSPH code, capable of simulating a collisionless fluid with the N-body method, and simulating an ideal gas by means of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) (Springel, 2005, Springel, 2005). By far the largest output data set produced by GADGET-2 is the Millenium Simulation run o