High Throughput Computing for Biological Sciences: Tools and Techniques

High Throughput Computing (HTC) provides rapid execution of large computational experiments that can be broken into a number of smaller components. This usually arises in experiments that involve parameter estimation and exploration, but also occurs in algorithms that scatter and gather computationally bound applications. HTC has had an increasing impact on science, medicine and engineering over the years, and is currently used in a number of research projects at Monash.

Over the years we have developed a family of software tools (called Nimrod) that makes it easy to specify large parametric experiments of this type. Nimrod provides seamless access to a range of computational resources, from local workstations to distributed clusters. Here we will discuss the application of this technology to problems in life sciences, ranging from drug design, cardiac modelling, clinical radiotherapy and protein structure determination.

David's presentation [43MB]
Slide 17 animation - pig heart beating [.wmv - 2.2MB]
Slide 28 animation - aerofoil design [.avi -7.65MB]
Slide 28 animation - running jobs internationally [.avi - 39.2MB]
Slide 45 animation - drug docking [.avi - 4.9MB]Top of page