p2pBIOFOCO: Proposing a Peer-to-Peer System for Distributed BLAST Execution

The peer-to-peer (P2P) model is currently being used for applications that demand great amount of time and space resources, taking advantage of idle and geographically distributed machines. Bioinformatics is a field that requires large amount of computational resources. In this context, we propose a P2P model that executes a particular bioinformatics application, named BLAST. This is a method for comparing two biological sequences at a time. But it requires a great amount of computation, since it compares a big file containing thousands of sequences that are being investigated and a very large database containing millions of biological sequences. We describe in detail the architecture of our framework, and present experiments using real biological data, that were executed on machines available in three institutions of Brazil - University of Brasilia, Catholic University of Brasilia and Embrapa/Genetic Resources and Biotechnology. The obtained results, when comparing the execution of BLAST in this P2P framework and its execution in the best machine of the three institutions, show that our P2P model can efficiently run other bioinformatics applications.