Lightgrid—an agile distributed computing architecture for Geant4

A light weight grid based computing architecture has been developed to accelerate Geant4 computations on a variety of network architectures. This new software is called LightGrid. LightGrid has a variety of features designed to overcome current limitations on other grid based computing platforms, more specifically, smaller network architectures. By focusing on smaller, local grids, LightGrid is able to simplify the grid computing process with minimal changes to existing Geant4 code. LightGrid allows for integration between Geant4 and MySQL, which both increases flexibility in the grid as well as provides a faster, reliable, and more portable method for accessing results than traditional data storage systems. This unique method of data acquisition allows for more fault tolerant runs as well as instant results from simulations as they occur. The performance increases brought along by using LightGrid allow simulation times to be decreased linearly. LightGrid also allows for pseudo-parallelization with minimal Geant4 code changes.