The Modeler's Workbench: a system for dynamically distributed simulation and data collection

A fundamental problem in today's research environment, particularly in the biological and environmental sciences, is the inability of researchers to perform even simple investigations due to the inaccessibility and essential difficulty in acquiring and utilizing the necessary data. Often the data and simulation models are available via the Internet, but through a combination of obscurity, incompatibility and inefficiency, they are essentially unusable. Our system - the Modeler's Workbench - aims to address these fundamental problems. Novel aspects of our system include the use of XML as both a resource description language and a machine-independent data transfer mechanism. We build on top of existing metacomputing tools, while providing an infrastructure based on Java wrappers around existing simulations, to provide compatibility with our infrastructure while retaining legacy code and allowing for machine-dependent optimizations. We have developed a prototype of our system, for which we present the design and experimental data. We also discuss our future plans.