DistMe: A Java Based Toolbox for the Distribution of Parallel Monte Carlo Simulations. Application to Nuclear Medicine Using the GATE Simulation Package

摘要

Monte Carlo simulations needing many replicates to obtain good statistical results can be executed in parallel using the "Multiple Replications In Parallel" approach using parallel streams of pseudo-random numbers. We have built a generic object-oriented toolbox called DistMe to automate such parallelization for any Monte Carlo simulation. This toolbox, written in Java is freely available on SourceForge, it is based on the use of a documented XML format for random numbers generators statuses. We have used this tool in a concrete case of distributed tomographic reconstruction using local clusters and grid computing. We obtained very convincing results with this large medical application, achieving in one week computations that could have taken more than 3 years of processing on a single computer.