A User-Friendly Task Editor Environment for Large-scale Virtual Screening Application

Virtual Screening (VS) is a large-scale parallel Bag-of-Tasks application whose tasks are independent with no data dependency and communication. Grid computing facilitates VS by providing shared computational resources across different international institutions. However, the traditional grid middle wares do not provide mechanism of task decomposition, and users usually need to decompose the large-scale independent tasks into small sub-tasks manually to make the most of the heterogeneous resources. Such method can be complex and may place a burden on the users. In this paper we propose a user-friendly Task Editor Environment extending JSDL for VS, including GUI Designer Data Description Module and Task Editor Module. The advantage of the proposal is to separate the data description from task definition description and ensure the task execution optimism. At last we present a case study, which turns out that our proposal not only satisfies the users´ need to perform the VS application in grid environment with a Task Editor Environment, but also improves the efficiency of VS application.