Gridifying Phylogeny and Medical Applications on the Volunteer Computing Platform XtremWeb-CH

XtremWeb-CH (XWCH) is a volunteer computing middleware that makes it easy for scientists and industrials to deploy and execute their parallel and distributed applications on a public-resource computing infrastructure. XWCH supports various high performance applications, including those having large storage and communication requirements. Two high performance applications were ported and deployed on an XWCH platform. The first one is the Phylip package of programs that is employed for inferring phylogenies (evolutionary trees). It is the most widely distributed phylogeny package and has been used to build the largest number of published trees. Some modules of Phylip are CPU time consuming; their sequential version cannot be applied to a large number of sequences. The second application ported on XWCH is a medical application used to generate temporal dynamic neuronal maps. The application,named NeuroWeb,is used to better understand the connectivity and activity of neurons. NeuroWeb is a data and CPU intensive application. This paper describes the different components of an XWCH platform and the lessons learned from gridifying Phylip and NeuroWeb. It also details the new features and extensions, which are being added to XWCH in order to support new types of applications.