Development of an automated gridded crop growth simulation support system for distributed computing with virtual machines

•A distributed computing system, GROWLERS, was developed for crop growth simulations.•GROWLERS requires minimum sets of user inputs and manual operations for distributed computing.•GROWLERS supports the crop model written in legacy code without modification to perform a gridded crop growth simulation.•The system would help researchers overcome technical barriers for gridded crop growth simulations to reduce the wall-clock time.