GeneGrid: a commercial grid service oriented virtual bioinformatics laboratory

GeneGrid is a collaborative industrial grid computing R&D project initiated by the Belfast e-Science Centre (BeSC) under the UK e-Science programme and supported by the UK Department of Trade & Industry (DTI). GeneGrid includes commercial partners who provide real business engagement. The project aims to provide a platform for scientists to access their collective resources, skills, experiences and results in a secure, reliable and scalable manner through the creation of a "virtual bioinformatics laboratory". GeneGrid provides seamless integration of a myriad of heterogeneous applications and datasets that span multiple administrative domains and locations across the globe, and presents these to the scientist through a simple user friendly interface. This paper presents each of the five main GeneGrid components, and discusses how these components are integrated to form an advanced service oriented architecture for automatic and dynamic in silico experiment execution. A commercial use case as provided by our industrial partners is also discussed.