G-BLAST: a grid-based solution for mpiBLAST on computational grids

The researches of bioinformatics have grown with each passing day so that more and more computing power is required for better performance. These requires usually solved by parallelism techniques, because cluster technology can reduce the execution time and increase alignment efficiency. For example, mpiBLAST is a parallelism solution of NCBI BLAST via MPI parallel programming. However, most laboratories can not build up powerful supercomputing environments. They usually connect dozen of personal computers to build cluster computing environments. Besides, cluster usually is limited by local environment that leads to extend equipments difficulty. The concepts of grid can solve these problems. Grid environments coordinate the resources of distributed virtual organizations and satisfy a great many computational demands. In this paper, we have deployed a biogrid framework called G-BLAST. G-BLAST was designed for sequence alignment to use grid environment and access mpiBLAST application from a server node. Because grid environment is a heterogeneous environment, G-BLAST is endowed with selection the most adaptive work nodes, dynamic fragmenting database, and self-adjust performance data abilities. Furthermore, we also deployed a grid service portal and a grid service GUI desk application for normal users to submit jobs and host administrators to maintain their own work nodes, and the interaction between this application and G-BLAST meets WSRF standards.