University of Calgary
Modeling Swarm Behavior
The study of swarm behavior and the development of more sophisticated swarm and evolutionary computational models are necessary steps toward the next generation of adaptive system automation. Jacob’s plans for the future include large-scale evolutionary environments and a large virtual ecosystem in which to design collectively intelligent systems through co-evolution. “Our goal is to establish new paradigms for system design and, in particular, to develop new ways of ‘programming’ swarm systems through evolution,” he says.
“Xgrid dramatically increases the processing power we have available for compute-intensive processes, and because it’s built into Mac OS X, it’s virtually effortless.”
An Apple Cinema Display shows 12 lactose operon models running simultaneously on a dual-processor Power Mac G5. The PowerBook to the right displays plots of particle concentrations. See sidebar on gene regulation.
Effortless Power
“One of the really big advantages the Mac gives us is Xgrid,” Jacob reports. “To run large simulations in a reasonable amount of time requires more processing capacity than even a fast dual-processor computer can provide on its own, and we don’t yet have the funding for a dedicated supercomputing cluster.”
Apple’s Xgrid distributed computing architecture takes advantage of Xgrid-compatible Mac resources the ESD Research Group already owns to achieve processing capacity that approaches that of a small supercomputer. When the computational load exceeds the capacity of the lab’s dual-processor Xserve G5, Xgrid locates compatible Mac desktop and laptop systems that are idle and automatically recruits them to form an ad hoc computational grid that can even include remote systems connected through the Internet.
“Xgrid dramatically increases the processing power we have available for compute-intensive processes,” says Jacob, “and because it’s built into Mac OS X, it’s virtually effortless.”
Close-up of a 3D simulation of lactose operon gene regulation. See sidebar.
Building on Success
Based on his success with the ESD lab, the university recently asked Jacob to take on an additional assignment. As director of bioinformatics for the Bachelor of Health Sciences (BHSc) Program in the Faculty of Medicine, Jacob is responsible for the program’s IT infrastructure. In the Faculty of Medicine, currently seven medical labs rely on Mac hardware and software, using an Xserve as their main data repository, all administered by Jacob’s ESD lab.
“The fact that any Mac can serve as an additional client for the Xgrid-controlled cluster makes the integration of Macs over the campus network feasible,” says Jacob. “The benefit is that investigators in the Faculty of Medicine can instantly use the distributed computing solutions my lab is developing for simulating large-scale biomolecular and bio-cellular systems and, when we have large simulations to run, the ESD lab can add any idle BHSc Mac resources to its total available computational capacity.”
As the interface between the computer science department and Faculty of Medicine, Jacob is constantly reminded that even highly educated professionals are not necessarily computer-savvy and that computers and applications must therefore strive for simplicity and ease of use. “Hiding the power of UNIX behind the user-friendly Mac interface works really well,” he reports. “The medical faculty gets applications that are easy to use, while we computer scientists get the powerful UNIX message-passing interface, Xgrid, and other features we need to provide the applications and services they depend on to do their work.
“We really depend on the robustness and interoperability of the UNIX-based Mac OS X,” Jacob continues, “because we’re providing essential services to various departments at the University of Calgary and interoperating with Linux and Solaris clusters here and at other institutions.”
As the Mac-based infrastructure at the university continues to grow, Jacob is already planning for the future. “Because we can’t afford to replace all our Macs every two or three years,” he says, “it’s very important for us to be able to add new equipment incrementally and flexibly wherever more resources are needed. We can add one or two machines to a small department anytime, with complete confidence that the new machines will integrate seamlessly into our existing Mac infrastructure with very little administrative overhead. And if we replace an ad hoc cluster of Mac desktop systems with an Xserve cluster, the powerful Mac OS X Server Administration tools make it really easy to re-deploy and re-configure those desktop systems wherever they’re needed.”
Among the social insects, the whole community prospers when individuals follow the lead of the most successful foragers. It must therefore be a source of quiet satisfaction to Jacob, who has made the study of collective intelligence his life’s work, to observe how the successful use of Mac technology in his ESD lab is spreading to other areas of the university. Among human beings just as much as among ants and bees, nothing speaks more convincingly than success.
