Sizing Up: Bioinformatics in a Grid Context
Fotis E Psomopoulos, Pericles A. Mitkas · 2008
* Correspondence to: [email protected] Abstract: A Grid environment can be viewed as a virtual computing architecture that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many computers geographically distributed and con- nected by a network. Bioinformatics applications stand to gain in such environment both in regards of computational resources available, but in reliability and efficiency as well. There are several approaches in literature which present the use of Grid resources in bioinformatics. Nevertheless, scientific progress is hindered by the fact that each re- searcher operates in relative isolation, regarding datasets and effort, since there is no universally accepted method- ology for performing bioinformatics tasks in a Grid. Given the complexity of both the data and the algorithms in- volved in the majority of cases, a case study on protein classification utilizing the Grid infrastructure, may be the first step in presenting a unifying methodology for bioin- formatics in a Grid context.