Valeria Ardizzone

GILDA: the grid INFN virtual laboratory for dissemination activities

The elements of the GILDA dissemination grid developed within the context of Italian INFN Grid Project and the European EGEE Project are presented and described.

The GENIUS Grid Portal: Its Architecture, Improvements of Features, and New Implementations about Authentication and Authorization

Since year 2006, the VOMS exensions are required from many virtual organizations in order to allow the access to various grid services by their users. The purpose of this work is to use grid services by GENIUS Grid Portal as front-end to the grid. The above described components, to generate a valid VOMS (virtual organization membership service) proxy on the user interface where the GENIUS portal is running, are integrate to offer to the end-user a unique service to be executed once after login or in following time after, in order to use the grid functionalities. In order to be sure that who input data is certainly a human people and preventing automated software from performing actions, a random CAPTCHA code (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) is adopted. After loading the applet for proxy creation and its transfer on reserved path on the UI, then the service performs as action the creation of 2 chain valid proxy with VOMS extensions.

Monte Carlo simulation of a clinical beam line: GEANT4 and Grid technology approach

A preliminary study on the possible use of the GEANT4 (geometry and tracking) toolkit and Grid technology, for the Monte Carlo simulation of a clinical beam line for proton therapy, has been investigated. We realized a GEANT4 application giving the possibility to simulate a typical proton therapy beam line (including all its elements and two dosimetric systems: an ionisation chamber and a radiochromic film). The application realized was tested simulating the proton therapy beam line operating at the Laboratori Nazionali del Sud of the Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Catania, Italy. Actually the main disadvantage of a Monte Carlo simulation are the long computation times. In order to overcome this problem and to obtain reasonable computation times we decided to exploit the power of the Grid. We based our work on the local Grid installed at the Physics Department of the Catania University consisting of 20 machine, each one with two INTEL-Xeon at 2.8 GHz processors. The Grid approach, consisting in the distribution of a single big job in many CPUs, permitted us to decrease, in the actual configuration, of a factor 20 the time necessary for a complete simulation. Obtained results permit us to affirm that GEANT4 toolkit, coupled with the Grid, can represent an answer for the routinary use of the Monte Carlo method for designing and simulating a clinical proton beam line. Moreover this can represent a first step for the use of Monte Carlo in proton treatment planning software development.