Autor

José Javier Alba Sánchez, Ignacio Pérez Dominguez, Luca Minghini, Miguel Ángel Díaz Corchero

Medio de Publicación

Congreso: IBERGRID, Valencia (Spain)
Año: 20-22 Mayo 2009
Tipo de publicación: Oral

Economic modellers at European Commission's Joint Research Centre are starting to exploit the benefits of high performance and high throughput computing, using the Grid and other available resources. With the said technology, they are able to run large-scale economic optimisation models in a timely fashion, so that they give prompt support to decision makers for the formulation of policies. However, modellers must face the challenge of running their models in user unfriendly and often hostile IT environments. Moreover, Grid infrastructures lack the support of commercial tools in common use in economic modelling, such as GAMS.

For IT managers, installing commercial packages (often Windows-based) in their Grid infrastructure is also a challenge because of the multiplicity of user requirements and products, maintenance, licensing and versioning, among other reasons. To overcome these problems, and with the help of the CETA-CIEMAT, we propose the use of virtual machines launched as jobs to the Grid. This level of abstraction and encapsulation allows both economic modellers and IT specialists to optimise their respective processes with a minimum level of interference between them, which in turn should stimulate true inter-disciplinary co-operation.