Grid services for genomic research. Polish national grid perspective

In this paper we present grid services for the biomolecular community offered by the Polish National Grid (Polish NGI). This work is motivated by the fact that in many application areas including life sciences there is increasing demand for disk space and computer power to store and process data. Emerging technologies such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) put additional stress on this demand. The amount of data which biologists have to handle is usually too big to be stored and processed in the laboratory using desktop or even more powerful single computers. The ultimate solution is grid technology offering seamless access to the distributed storage and computational resources. There has been number of different grid infrastructures used. The solution built using UNICORE middleware is example of the most successful one. In this paper we present the UNICORE installation in the Polish NGI. We provide details of the middleware deployment on the PL-Grid infrastructure. Overview of the bioinformatics related services is extended by the details of the grid deployment of the widely used bioinformatic applications such as BLAST. We also provide description of the grid infrastructure and services developed to support gene sequencing and its use in the diagnostics process. The storage and computational grid services are fully integrated with the sequencing equipment to make whole process seamless and easy to use. The described solution allowed to simplify analysis of sequencing results and make them available in the short time feasible for medical diagnosis.