Ensembles of widely distributed, heterogeneous resources, or Grids, have emerged as popular platforms for largescale scientific applications. In this paper we present the Virtual Instrument project, which provides an integrated application execution environment that enables end-users to run and interact with running scientific simulations on Grids. This work is performed in the specific 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 scientific advances. Our goal is to create a scientific “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.

中文翻译：

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虚拟仪器：支持启用网格的 Mcell 仿真

广泛分布的异构资源或网格的集合已成为大规模科学应用的流行平台。在本文中，我们介绍了虚拟仪器项目，它提供了一个集成的应用程序执行环境，使最终用户能够在网格上运行科学模拟并与之交互。这项工作是在计算生物学应用程序 MCell 的特定上下文中执行的。虽然 MCell 为运行模拟提供了基础，但其功能目前在规模、易用性和交互性方面受到限制。这些限制排除了对科学进步至关重要的使用场景。我们的目标是通过允许其用户透明地访问网格资源同时能够控制正在运行的模拟，从 MCell 创建一个科学的“虚拟仪器”。在本文中，我们推动了虚拟仪器项目，并讨论了网格软件开发和应用程序调度领域的一些相关问题和成果。然后我们描述我们的软件设计并报告当前的实施情况。我们通过在真实世界的网格测试台上使用 MCell 进行实验来验证和评估我们的设计。