The Virtual Instrument: Support for Grid-enabled Scientific Simulations

Ensembles of widely distributed, heterogeneous resources, or Grids, have emerged as popular platforms for large-scale scienti¯c applications. This paper presents the Virtual Instrument project, which provides an integrated ap-plication execution environment that enables end-users to run and interact with running scienti¯c simulations on Grids. This work is performed in the speci¯c 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 scienti¯c advances. Our goal is to create a scienti¯c \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. 1