A national scientific computing environment for the biological sciences

A framework for developing a computing environment for researchers in the biological sciences which utilizes HPCC resources is described. This framework addresses the need to provide an organized network resource discovery and access capability for the genome researcher on a national scale. In particular, this framework addresses the issues of integrating autonomous computing tools, authenticating both users and the tools being accessed, dynamic and transparent tool location determination, application and network fault tolerance, and scalability. This framework is based, in part, on open-systems concepts and a distributed computing paradigm.<>