Simulatori stocastici paralleli per la biologia dei sistemi: l'evoluzione della specie

The stochastic simulation of biological systems is an increasingly popular technique in bioinformatics. It is often an enlightening technique, especially for multi-stable systems which dynamics can be hardly captured with ordinary differential equations. To be effective, stochastic simulations should be supported by powerful statistical analysis tools. The simulation/analysis workflow may however result in being computationally expensive, thus compromising the interactivity required especially in model tuning. In this work we discuss the main opportunities to speed up the framework by parallelisation on modern multicore and hybrid multicore and distributed platforms, advocating the high-level design of simulators for stochastic systems as a vehicle for building efficient and portable parallel simulators endowed with on-line statistical analysis. In particular, the Calculus of Wrapped Compartments (CWC) simulator, which is designed according to the FastFlow's pattern-based approach, is presented and discussed in this work.