Experiences on a large scale grid deployment with a computationally intensive biomedical application

Abstract

With the recent advent of Grid Computing technologies, resource-starved applications can greatly benefit from the power that the Grid aims to deliver. In this paper, we focus on the application of Grid Computing to a biomedical computationally intensive application that simulates the electrical activity on cardiac tissues. A user level tool, called GMarte, was developed to simplify the usage of Grid facilities for the execution of scientific applications on distributed deployments. A cardiac case study has been executed, via GMarte, on the largest distributed Grid deployment available in Europe (the EGEE testbed) in order to assess the benefits of Grid Computing. The usage of a Grid infrastructure has dramatically reduced the time required to execute the case study, thus increasing research productivity.