UK National Grid Service - Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Applications - page 160

produced by the NGS to promote and illustrate to communities the types
of research and the benei ts of using grid resources such as the NGS. These
and other case studies are regularly updated and made available on the
NGS Web site.

6.11.1 Grid-Enabled Neurosurgical Imaging Using Simulation

(GENIUS)

One of the largest community user groups of the NGS is the biosciences.
For example, the NGS has played a major role in the GENIUS project (grid-
enabled neurosurgical imaging using simulation), which is led by Professor
Peter Coveney at UCL (Figure 6.1).
Many neurological conditions can be better understood and treated if
the blood l ow of the patient is studied, and studying the patient's blood
l ow around the brain with a system like GENIUS before surgery can
greatly increase the chances of success. MRI scans are used to provide the
data to reconstruct the neurovascular structure of real patients and a
lattice-Boltzmann l uid l ow solver called HemeLB is used to simulate the
l ow of blood around the reconstructed vessels. The GENIUS project
makes use of distributed grid computing by running geographically
distributed parallelization of simulations. This allows the simulations to
run on a number of processors on several machines, decreases the
turnaround time for simulations, and returns the results to the clinicians
as fast as possible. This project demonstrated the collaboration that can

FIGURE 6.1 Visualizing blood l ow around a patient's brain in real time.