C. Elegans is a primitive multicellular organism (worm) that shares many important biological characteristics that arise as complications within human beings. It begins as a single cell and then undergoes a complex embryogenesis to form a complete animal. Using experimental data, the early stages of life of the cells are simulated by computers. The goal of this project is to use this simulation to compare the embryogenesis stage of C. Elegans cells with that of human cells. Since the simulation involves the manipulation of many files and large amounts of data, the power provided by supercomputers and parallel programming is required. The serial agent based simulation program NetLogo completed the simulation in roughly six minutes. By comparison, using the parallel agent based simulation toolkit RepastHPC, the simulation completed in under a minute when executing on four processors of a small cluster. Unlike NetLogo, RepastHPC does not contain a visual element. Therefore, a visualization program, VisIt, was used to graphically show the data produced by the RepastHPC simulation.
