Performing in silico experiments on the Grid: a users perspective.

Stevens, R; Glover, K; Greenhalgh, C; Jennings, C; Pearce, S; Li, P,; Wipat, A

Performing in silico experiments on the Grid: a users perspective.

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Peter Li

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Abstract

e-Science and the Grid are not the same; the large-scale movement of data and the exploitation of computation is not the same as the creation, performance and management of an in silico experiment. The notion of the marshalling of resources and creation of virtual organisations begins to bring in a flavour of science, but something more is needed over and above the classic Grid to enable e-Science. This paper looks at the requirements of e-Science from the user's perspective. The myGrid project aims to provide a toolkit of services that comprise the Information Grid and the applications that sit there upon. The aim is to provide a set of services that have the facilities to enable bioinformaticians (in particular) to perform in silico experiments using applications built upon components from a Grid enabled middleware layer. This paper introduces the myGrid project and explores the nature of an in silico experiment for the bioinformatics domain. The paper then reviews the general user requirements for an empirical e-Scientist. We then introduce a biological scenario, where bench experiments are coupled to in silico experiments, which we have used to drive the user requirements capture in myGrid. Then, the myGrid workbench, an application that demonstrates the functionality of myGrid is reviewed. Finally, we match the current status of myGrid to our general requirements and explore how we can use the current implementation to drive the capture of further, more detailed user requirements.