The Nimrod Toolkit

Parametric computational experiments are becoming increasingly important in science and engineering as a means of exploring the behavior of complex systems. For example, an engineer may explore the behaviour of a wing by running a computational model of the airfoil multiple times while varying key parameters such as angle of attack, air speed, etc. The results of these multiple experiments yield a picture of how the wing behaves in different parts of parametric space. Over the past several years, we have developed a specialized parametric modeling system called Nimrod. Nimrod uses a simple declarative parametric modeling language to express a parametric experiment and provides machinery that automates the task of formulating, running, monitoring, and collating the results from the multiple individual experiments. Equally important, Nimrod incorporates a distributed scheduling component that can manage the scheduling of individual experiments to idle computers in a local area network. Together, these features mean that even complex parametric experiments can be defined and run with little programmer effort. In many cases it is possible to establish a new experiment in minutes.

Nimrod supports workflows for robust design and search and allows scientists to:

• Vary parameters
• Execute programs
• Copy data in and out

Other Features are:

• Sequential and parallel dependencies
• Multiple parameter exploration tools, including sweeps, optimizations and experimental designs
• Computational economy drives scheduling
• Computation scheduled near data when appropriate
• Uses distributed high performance platforms
• Upper middleware broker for resources discovery
• Wide Community adoption
• Cloud computing interface

Want to acknowledge us?

If you have used Nimrod for some research and would like to acknowledge it in your paper, we would welcome your use of the following text:

We wish to acknowledge Monash University for the use of their Nimrod software in this work. The Nimrod project has been funded by the Australian Research Council and a number of Australian Government agencies, and was initially developed by the Distributed Systems Technology CRC.

Nimrod/G references should cite: Abramson, D., Giddy, J. and Kotler, L. “High Performance Parametric Modeling with Nimrod/G: Killer Application for the Global Grid?”, International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), pp 520- 528, Cancun, Mexico, May 2000

Nimrod/O references should cite: Abramson D, Lewis A, Peachey T, Fletcher, C., “An Automatic Design Optimization Tool and its Application to Computational Fluid Dynamics”, SuperComputing 2001, Denver, Nov 2001.