Agent-based modeling supporting the migration of registry systems to grid based architectures.

With the increasing age and cost of operation of the existing NCI SEER platform core technologies, such essential resources in the fight against cancer as these will eventually have to be migrated to Grid based systems. In order to model this migration, a simulation is proposed based upon an agent modeling technology. This modeling technique allows for simulation of complex and distributed services provided by a large scale Grid computing platform such as the caBIG(™) project's caGRID. In order to investigate such a migration to a Grid based platform technology, this paper proposes using agent-based modeling simulations to predict the performance of current and Grid configurations of the NCI SEER system integrated with the existing translational opportunities afforded by caGRID. The model illustrates how the use of Grid technology can potentially improve system response time as systems under test are scaled. In modeling SEER nodes accessing multiple registry silos, we show that the performance of SEER applications re-implemented in a Grid native manner exhibits a nearly constant user response time with increasing numbers of distributed registry silos, compared with the current application architecture which exhibits a linear increase in response time for increasing numbers of silos.