Launcher: A Shell-based Framework for Rapid Development of Parallel Parametric Studies

Petascale computing systems have enabled tremendous advances for traditional simulation and modeling algorithms that are built around parallel execution. Unfortunately, scientific domains using data-oriented or high-throughput paradigms have difficulty taking full advantage of these resources without custom software development. This paper describes our solution for rapidly developing parallel parametric studies using sequential or threaded tasks: The launcher. We detail how to get ensembles executing quickly through common job schedulers SGE and SLURM, and the various user-customizable options that the launcher provides. We illustrate the efficiency of or tool by presenting execution results at large scale (over 65,000 cores) for varying workloads, including a virtual screening workload with indeterminate runtimes using the drug docking software Autodock Vina.