Computational experiments using spatial stochastic simulations have led to important new biological insights, but they require specialized tools and a complex software stack, as well as large and scalable compute and data analysis resources due to the large computational cost associated with Monte Carlo computational workflows. The complexity of setting up and managing a large-scale distributed computation environment to support productive and reproducible modeling can be prohibitive for practitioners in systems biology. This results in a barrier to the adoption of spatial stochastic simulation tools, effectively limiting the type of biological questions addressed by quantitative modeling. In this paper, we present PyURDME, a new, user-friendly spatial modeling and simulation package, and MOLNs, a cloud computing appliance for distributed simulation of stochastic reaction-diffusion models. MOLNs is based on IPython and provides an interactive programming platform for development of sharable and reproducible distributed parallel computational experiments.

BackgroundDocking and scoring large libraries of ligands against target proteins forms the basis of structure-based virtual screening. The problem is trivially parallelizable, and calculations are generally carried out on computer clusters or on large workstations in a brute force manner, by docking and scoring all available ligands.ContributionIn this study we propose a strategy that is based on iteratively docking a set of ligands to form a training set, training a ligand-based model on this set, and predicting the remainder of the ligands to exclude those predicted as ‘low-scoring’ ligands. Then, another set of ligands are docked, the model is retrained and the process is repeated until a certain model efficiency level is reached. Thereafter, the remaining ligands are docked or excluded based on this model. We use SVM and conformal prediction to deliver valid prediction intervals for ranking the predicted ligands, and Apache Spark to parallelize both the docking and the modeling.ResultsWe show on 4 different targets that conformal prediction based virtual screening (CPVS) is able to reduce the number of docked molecules by 62.61% while retaining an accuracy for the top 30 hits of 94% on average and a speedup of 3.7. The implementation is available as open source via GitHub (https://github.com/laeeq80/spark-cpvs) and can be run on high-performance computers as well as on cloud resources.

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Federated machine learning has great promise to overcome the input privacy challenge in machine learning. The appearance of several projects capable of simulating federated learning has led to a corresponding rapid progress on algorithmic aspects of the problem. However, there is still a lack of federated machine learning frameworks that focus on fundamental aspects such as scalability, robustness, security, and performance in a geographically distributed setting. To bridge this gap we have designed and developed the FEDn framework. A main feature of FEDn is to support both cross-device and cross-silo training settings. This makes FEDn a powerful tool for researching a wide range of machine learning applications in a realistic setting.