GLAD: A system for developing and deploying large-scale bioinformatics grid

Abstract

Motivation: Grid computing is used to solve large-scale bioinformatics problems with gigabytes database by distributing the computation across multiple platforms. Untill now in developing bioinformatics grid applications, it is extremely tedious to design and implement the component algorithms and parallelization techniques for different classes of problems, and to access remotely located sequence database files of varying formats across the grid. In this study, we propose a grid programming toolkit, GLAD (Grid Life sciences Applications Developer), which facilitates the development and deployment of bioinformatics applications on a grid. Results: GLAD has been developed using ALiCE (Adaptive scaLable Internet-based Computing Engine), a Java-based grid middleware, which exploits the task-based parallelism. Two bioinformatics benchmark applications, such as distributed sequence comparison and distributed progressive multiple sequence alignment, have been developed using GLAD. © The Author 2004. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.