UK National Grid Service - Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Applications - page 161

take place between different national grids as this simulation was run on
the NGS, the TeraGrid (the US national grid), and the Louisiana Optical
Network Initiative (LONI). Real-time visualization is achieved by incor-
porating a ray tracer into the HemeLB algorithm. Dedicated optical i ber
links connect the supercomputers to the clinicians' desktop so clinicians
can then easily view the live visualization on their desktops. They can
also steer the simulation by moving the model around to get a better look
at areas of interest and altering input data.

6.11.2 Modeling and Simulation for e-Social Science (MoSeS)

Planning for services such as transport, health, schools, and housing
requires information about the human population, their residences, and
activity. The UK census, last carried out in 2001, has become more detailed
and more used in activities such as public service planning. It can provide
important statistics, including estimates of how many people live in an
area, how old they are, their current occupations, and the health and
provision of care to others.
Dr. Andy Turner and colleagues at the University of Leeds are aiming to
take the use of the census and other population data in public service
planning a step further by developing national demographic simulations
and to enable their use by social scientists and policy planners to help
answer specii c questions and analyze scenarios; for example, estimating
demand for services such as transport schemes or for access to health and
social care services for specii c areas.
The basis of the demographic modeling are data from the 2001 census and
various census datasets are used to generate individual and household-
level datasets for 2001. These data for 2001 are then projected at the indi-
vidual and household level for small areas on a yearly basis up to 2031.
It is hoped that a scenario-based forecasting approach will allow social
scientists to examine possible effects of environmental change and better
plan for the likely effects of an aging population. All of the modeling code
has been written by the project members using Java and parts of it have
been parallelized to take advantage of high-end computers like those
available on the NGS ( Figure 6.2 ) .

6.11.3 RTGrid

Radiotherapy, an extremely effective form of treatment for many cancers,
requires a great deal of careful planning for each individual patient as
radiotherapists need to dei ne the target area and amount of radiation
each patient will receive. The shape and the direction of the radiation
beam are also important considerations as it is essential to ensure the least
amount of damage to the healthy tissue surrounding the treated area.