Scientific
Applications:
GLOBAL GRIDS ANALYZE ON DEMAND
BRAIN ACTIVITY
The lack of computational power within an organization for analyzing
scientific data, and the distribution of knowledge (by scientists) and
technologies (advanced scientific devices) are two major problems commonly
observed in scientific disciplines. One such scientific discipline is brain
science. The analysis of brain activity data gathered from the MEG
(Magnetoencephalography) instrument is an important research topic in medical
science since it helps doctors in identifying symptoms of diseases. The data
needs to be analyzed exhaustively to efficiently diagnose and analyze brain
functions and requires access to large-scale computational resources. The
potential platform for solving such resource intensive applications is the
Grid.
A team of researchers from Australia (GRIDS Lab @ the University of
Melbourne;
and Monash University) and Japan (Osaka University) have developed a Grid
technology that supports on-demand and economical analysis of brain activity
data (captured from the MEG instrument located in Osaka University) on Global
Grids. The work leveraged Grid technologies, primarily Nimrod-G, Gridbus, and
Globus in achieving the same. They have carried out scheduling experiments
with deadline of 6hrs and budget limit of G$ 1990 for three different
optimsation strategies (cost, time, cost-time) on the World Wide Grid (WWG)
testbed resources. The testbed resources used in this experiment where
provided by N*Grid Project Korea; Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands; Osaka
University, Japan; and Uni. of Melbourne.
For description on system architecture, Grid enabling of application, and
scheduling experiments results, please browse the technical report available
at:
www.gridbus.org/papers/neurogrid.pdf.
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