title: THE VIRTUAL INSTRUMENT: SUPPORT FOR GRID-ENABLED MCELL SIMULATIONS.
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.
authors.affiliation: SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER AND DEPT. OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO.
authors.forename: Henri
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Casanova
authors.forename: Francine
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Berman
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bartol
authors.forename: Erhan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gokcay
authors.forename: Terry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sejnowski
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Birnbaum
authors.forename: Jack
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Dongarra
authors.forename: Michelle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ellisman
authors.forename: Marcio
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Faerman
authors.forename: Graziano
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Obertelli
authors.forename: Rich
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wolski
authors.forename: Stuart
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pomerantz
authors.forename: Joel
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Stiles