Scaling up Genome Similarity Search Services through Content Distribution

As the increase of genome database size, there are increasing number of methods for detecting sequence similarity and increasing demands for genome sequence search and alignment services. It is a challenge to scale up the computer systems for serving these demands in a timely manner. This paper tackles this problem from a novel perspective, which treats the sequence search requests as content requests to both genome databases and similarity detection methods; therefore, scaling up the computer systems that serve these contents is a process of constructing content distribution network. The paper gives a decentralized method to construct content distribution network for a variety of genome sequence similarity detection services. It also gives a scheduling algorithm for efficiently using content nodes. Our simulation results show that scalability and high content node utilization can be achieved in such a system while the costs of achieving these are controllable.