Parallel techniques for Virtual Cell

The Virtual Cell is a simulation package created by the National Resource for Cell Analysis and Modeling (NRCAM). It enables users to model cell biological processes [J.C. Schaff et al. (2001)]. The core of the Virtual Cell is solving a system of PDEs. Sequential runs of the Virtual Cell can take large amounts of time and hence parallelization is needed. In this paper we present a parallel implementation of a model that is inspired by the one-dimensional version of the Virtual Cell. Our experimental results show that this parallelization is quite effective. In particular, the speedups we obtain are good implying that the parallel techniques employed could improve the performance of the Virtual Cell.