Integrative Biology and e-Science challenges
The e-Science vision driving the Integrative Biology project is of Grid technology enabling the computational biologist to carry out collaborative in-silico experiments within a distributed virtual laboratory, or 'collaboratory', which integrates the best available resources for computation, data management, visualisation and data analysis. This environment will facilitate assimilation of clinical and experimental data with computational results to refine models and validate simulations until they achieve the necessary accuracy.
The project is a second generation e-Science project which is building on many developments emerging from first generation projects and at the same time is itself advancing the e-Science agenda on several fronts.
The e-Science challenges for the project include:
- providing transparent, co-scheduled access to appropriate combinations of distributed high performance computers and database resources needed to run coupled multi-scale whole organ simulations
- exploiting these resources efficiently through application of computational steering, workflow, visualisation and other techniques developed in earlier e-Science projects
- enabling globally distributed biomedical researchers to collaboratively control, analyse and visualise simulation results in order to progress the scientific agenda of the project
- maintaining a secure environment for the resources used and information generated by the project without inhibiting scientific collaboration