Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) simulation on EGEE grid architecture: a web portal design

In this paper, we present a web portal that enables simulation of MRI images on the grid. Such simulations are done using the SIMRI MRI simulator that is implemented on the grid using MPI and the LCG2 middleware. MRI simulations are mainly used to study MRI sequence, and to validate image processing algorithms. As MRI simulation is computationally very expensive, grid technologies appear to be a real added value for the MRI simulation task. Nevertheless the grid access should be simplified to enable final user running MRI simulations. That is why we develop this specific web portal to propose a user friendly interface for MRI simulation on the grid. The web portal is designed using a three layers client/server architecture. Its main component is the process layer part that manages the simulation jobs. This part is mainly based on a java thread that screens a data base of simulation jobs. The thread submits the new jobs to the grid and updates the status of the running jobs. When a job is terminated, the thread sends the simulated image to the user. Through a client web interface, the user can submit new simulation jobs, get a detailed status of the running jobs, have the history of all the terminated jobs as well as their status and corresponding simulated image.