No Arabic abstract
Computer simulations have become a very powerful tool for scientific research. Given the vast complexity that comes with many open scientific questions, a purely analytical or experimental approach is often not viable. For example, biological systems (such as the human brain) comprise an extremely complex organization and heterogeneous interactions across different spatial and temporal scales. In order to facilitate research on such problems, the BioDynaMo project (url{https://biodynamo.web.cern.ch/}) aims at a general platform for computer simulations for biological research. Since the scientific investigations require extensive computer resources, this platform should be executable on hybrid cloud computing systems, allowing for the efficient use of state-of-the-art computing technology. This paper describes challenges during the early stages of the software development process. In particular, we describe issues regarding the implementation and the highly interdisciplinary as well as international nature of the collaboration. Moreover, we explain the methodologies, the approach, and the lessons learnt by the team during these first stages.
This paper is a brief update on developments in the BioDynaMo project, a new platform for computer simulations for biological research. We will discuss the new capabilities of the simulator, important new concepts simulation methodology as well as its numerous applications to the computational biology and nanoscience communities.
Computer simulations have become a very powerful tool for scientific research. In order to facilitate research in computational biology, the BioDynaMo project aims at a general platform for biological computer simulations, which should be executable on hybrid cloud computing systems. This paper describes challenges and lessons learnt during the early stages of the software development process, in the context of implementation issues and the international nature of the collaboration.
Motivation: Agent-based modeling is an indispensable tool for studying complex biological systems. However, existing simulators do not always take full advantage of modern hardware and often have a field-specific software design. Results: We present a novel simulation platform called BioDynaMo that alleviates both of these problems. BioDynaMo features a general-purpose and high-performance simulation engine. We demonstrate that BioDynaMo can be used to simulate use cases in: neuroscience, oncology, and epidemiology. For each use case we validate our findings with experimental data or an analytical solution. Our performance results show that BioDynaMo performs up to three orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art baseline. This improvement makes it feasible to simulate each use case with one billion agents on a single server, showcasing the potential BioDynaMo has for computational biology research. Availability: BioDynaMo is an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license and is available at www.biodynamo.org. Instructions to reproduce the results are available in supplementary information. Contact:
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] Supplementary information: Available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4501515
The DMTPC detector is a low-pressure CF4 TPC with optical readout for directional detection of Dark Matter. The combination of the energy and directional tracking information allows for an efficient suppression of all backgrounds. The choice of gas (CF4) makes this detector particularly sensitive to spin-dependent interactions.
RooStats is a project to create advanced statistical tools required for the analysis of LHC data, with emphasis on discoveries, confidence intervals, and combined measurements. The idea is to provide the major statistical techniques as a set of C++ classes with coherent interfaces, so that can be used on arbitrary model and datasets in a common way. The classes are built on top of the RooFit package, which provides functionality for easily creating probability models, for analysis combinations and for digital publications of the results. We will present in detail the design and the implementation of the different statistical methods of RooStats. We will describe the various classes for interval estimation and for hypothesis test depending on different statistical techniques such as those based on the likelihood function, or on frequentists or bayesian statistics. These methods can be applied in complex problems, including cases with multiple parameters of interest and various nuisance parameters.