Section: Application Domains

Décrypthon

The Décrypthon project is built over a collaboration between CNRS, AFM (Association Française contre les Myopathies ), and IBM. Its goal is to make computational and storage resources available to bioinformatic research teams in France. These resources, connected as a Grid through the Renater network, are installed in six universities and schools in France (Bordeaux, Jussieu, Lille, Lyon, Orsay, and Rouen). The Décrypthon project offers means necessary to use the Grid through financing of research teams and postdoc, and assistance on computer science problems (such as modeling, application development, and data management). The Graal research team is involved in this project as an expert for application gridification. The Grid middleware used at the beginning of the project was GridMP from United Devices. In 2007, Diet was chosen to be the Grid middleware of the Décrypthon Grid. It ensures the load-balancing of jobs over the six computation centers through the Renater network. This transfer of our middleware, first built for large scale experimentations of scheduling heuristics, in a production Grid is a real victory for our research team.

In 2009, we have made updates of the existing applications on the Decrypthon grid (MS2PH and Docking/MaxDO). We also added features to the DIET WebBoard (web interface for managing the Decrypthon Grid through DIET): possibility to use a postgreSQL database instead of a MySQL one, support for parallel jobs, a new search page, functions to manage storage space, ... We are now porting a new BLAST application and an OMSSA application on the Decrypthon grid.

The MaxDO “Help cure muscular dystrophy, phase 2” was ported on the World Community Grid. To determine the size of the work-units sent to the World Community Grid users we ran benchmarks on Grid'5000. Finally on May 14th 2009 the project was launched and it is running since then. On December 16th 2009 a total of 9,507,842 work-unit results had been sent back by the World Community Grid volunteers, this is 13,061,972,568 positions out of 137,652,178,995 (9.49% of the project, each work-unit contains hundreds of “positions” for two proteins: the result is an energy value for this configuration). We are also sorting the result files, reducing their size, and making statistics for the volunteers (cf http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~nbard/WCGStats/ ). The estimated end of the project is for the end of 2011.