ITR: Virtual Instruments: Scalable Software Instruments for the Grid

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Ensembles of distributed communication, computation, and storage resources, also known as "Computational Grids", are emerging as a critical platform for high-performance computing. Grids are used effectively to support runs of distributed applications at a large enough scale to provide new disciplinary results to their developers. Researchers in almost every field of science and engineering are particularly interested in a class of applications particularly well suited to the Grid, scientific simulations where many parameterized instances of a give computation are performed. The development of accessible, efficient, fault-tolerant Grid-enabled versions of simulation software will enable disciplinary scientists to investigate wide-ranging scenarios and to obtain new results orders of magnitude faster than is currently possible.Many scientists would like to view large-scale simulations as software instruments that support some level of user interaction. This would be effective only if simulations can be deployed easily and controlled dynamically, i.e. if the computation can be steered. A traditional scenario is for the user to steer the simulation based on partial results that evolve continuously during execution. The partial results provide an increasingly refined indicator of the final results of the simulation and can be used to identify mid-execution which parameter sets are most promising. Given the potential of wide-area, federated Grid environments to deliver the aggregate computational power, data storage and dissemination facilities for large-scale simulations, and the need for scientists to steer such computations, it is increasingly important to develop performance-efficient and steerable software instruments that target the Grid. This project will address the significant computer science problems that arise from the need to support steerable scientific simulations in large-scale Grid environments.The project will design, develop, and prototype a virtual software instrument as a vehicle for designing and prototyping scalable, steerable scientific simulations for the Grid. It will use a Monte Carlo simulation program, MCell, as a prototype application for development and testing of the virtual instrument. The virtual instrument itself will consist of a set of software modules, libraries, interfaces, and steering-sensitive scheduling algorithms. The project will have impact on both the computer science and disciplinary science communities. It will foster new research in computer science through the development of event models, performance models, data management strategies, and adaptive scheduling and steering algorithms. It will also enable domain scientists to obtain new results in neuroscience.