Enabling Grids for GATE Monte-Carlo Radiation Therapy Simulations with the GATE-Lab

Among radiation therapy simulation methods, Monte-Carlo approaches are known to be the most accurate but they are heavy to use because of their computing time. Nowadays they can be accelerated with the help of the ever-increasing computing power and distributed resources mutualised in clusters, clouds or grids (Montagnat et al. (2005)). Grid infrastructures are used both for experimental and production purposes. They have been designed to support data and computing requirements for a large spectrum of applications from various scientific domains. Nevertheless they are not yet at a "plug and play" phase that would allow applications to be easily and efficiently deployed on the existing infrastructure. Efforts are required to achieve reliable and efficient execution on the grid for new applications and to provide user-friendly execution environments to end-users. This chapter presents a solution for reliable, user-friendly and fast execution of GATE (Jan et al. (2004)) on a grid. Developed within the OpenGate1 international collaboration, GATE is a Monte-Carlo based open-source software for nuclear medicine simulations, especially for TEP and SPECT imaging, and for radiation therapy applications. The solution proposed here enables transparent grid execution from a user-friendly interface. The application is parallelized automatically and a dynamic partitioning can also be used for further reducing the execution time and improving the robustness to job failures (Camarasu-Pop et al. (2010)). This chapter will discuss in more detail the implemented solution by describing the user interface, the system architecture, as well as the dynamic optimization strategy. Usage and performance results illustrating the system adoptionwill then be presented. To conclude with, it will discuss the lessons learned in building the system.