Enabling Large Scale Data Production for OpenDose with GATE on the EGI Infrastructure

International audienceThe OpenDose collaboration has been established to generate an open and traceable reference database of dosimetric data for nuclear medicine, using a variety of Monte Carlo codes. The amount of data to generate requires to run tens of thousands of simulations per anthropomorphic model, for a total computation time estimated to millions of CPU hours. To tackle this challenge, a project has been initiated to enable large scale data production with the Monte Carlo code GATE. Within this project, CRCT, Inserm CISI and CREATIS worked on developing solutions to run Gate simulations on the EGI grid infrastructure using existing tools such as VIP and GateLab. Those developments include a new GATE grid application deployed on VIP, modifications to the existing GateLab application, and the development of a client code using a REST API for using both. Developed tools have already allowed running 30% of GATE simulations for the first 2 models (adult male and adult female). Ongoing and future work includes improvements both to code and submission strategies, documentation and packaging of the code, definition and implementation of a long-term storage strategy, extension to other models, and generalisation of the tools to the other Monte Carlo codes used within the OpenDose collaboration