The Virtual Instrument: Support for Grid-Enabled Mcell Simulations

  • Authors:

  • Henri Casanova;Francine Berman;Thomas Bartol;Erhan Gokcay;Terry Sejnowski;Adam Birnbaum;Jack Dongarra;Michelle Miller;Mark Ellisman;Marcio Faerman;Graziano Obertelli;Rich Wolski;Stuart Pomerantz;Joel Stiles

  • Affiliations:

  • San Diego Supercomputer Center and Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego;San Diego Supercomputer Center and Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San DIEGO;Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute;Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute;Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute;San Diego Supercomputer Center;Dept. of Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville;Dept. of Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville;National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, University of California, San Diego;Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego;Dept. of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara;Dept. of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara;Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center;Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
  • Year:
  • 2004

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Ensembles of widely distributed, heterogeneous resources, or Grids, have emerged as popular platforms for large-scale scientific applications. In this paper we present the Virtual Instrument project, which provides an integrated application execution environment that enables end-users to run and interact with running scientific simulations on Grids. This work is performed in the specific context of MCell, a computational biology application. While MCell provides the basis for running simulations, its capabilities are currently limited in terms of scale, ease-of-use, and interactivity. These limitations preclude usage scenarios that are critical for scientific advances. Our goal is to create a scientific "Virtual Instrument" from MCell by allowing its users to transparently access Grid resources while being able to steer running simulations. In this paper, we motivate the Virtual Instrument project and discuss a number of relevant issues and accomplishments in the area of Grid software development and application scheduling. We then describe our software design and report on the current implementation. We verify and evaluate our design via experiments with MCell on a real-world Grid testbed.