BioSysBio:abstracts.

Bacterial biofilms provide systems of the immense complexity needed to exemplify many of the generic features of multi-cellular behaviour, without such complexity at once becoming overwhelming; they are in addition of enormous environmental, industrial and medical importance. Many processes operate at the macroscopic scale and are thus susceptible continuum modelling approaches. It is essential, however, that models incorporate in an appropriate way information about the micro-scale behaviour and their results must in turn be coupled back into the rules adopted in the cell-scale modelling, motivating the the use of agent-based modelling. The simulation of systems of the complexity alluded to above typically requires huge computing resources and the associated data sets required may also be geographically distributed. The Grid provides an unrivalled technology for large scale distributed simulation and is exceptionally well suited to addressing the challenges raised by integrative-biology topics of the type we shall seek to address. In this paper we present BacGrid a system for performing distributed simulation of bacteria using the High Level Architecture (HLA) and the Grid. We present the bacterial model and show results from initial experiments investigating the role of Quorum sensing molecule (QSM) in the development of the bacterial colony. We go on to sketch out the design for the distribution of multiple bacterial simulations across the grid and indicate how this technology can be used to create large scale simulations. We conclude with a discussion of the current status of the system and our plans for future work and experiments.