Challenges in executing large parameter sweep studies across widely distributed computing environments

Large parameter sweep studies are common in a broad range of scientific disciplines. However, many challenges exist in supporting this type of computation in a widely distributed computing environment. These challenges exist because contributing sites in a federated distributed computing environment usually expose only a very narrow resource-sharing interface. This paper looks at the challenges encountered by parameter sweep studies using two concrete application examples. The paper also shows how a system for building personal clusters on demand has been developed to solve many of these problems.