OBIGrid: A New Computing Platform for Bioinformatics

Recently, bioinformatics requires high performance computing facilities for homology search, molecular simulation, cell simulation etal. Grid computing [1] has a potential for expansion in computing performance by connecting a large number of computers or PC clusters with high performance networks. Along with this line, we have designed and developed the Open Bioinformatics Grid (OBIGrid [2] http://www.obigrid.org/ ) in corporation with Japan Committee on High-Performance Computing for Bioinformatics and Initiative for Parallel Bioinformatics Processing (IPAB). On designing OBIGrid, we emphasize the importance of network transparency and security policy issues rather than the performance at the early development stage. Therefore, we adopt a virtual private network (VPN) to protect a Grid system from/to the outer world. As for bioinformatics environment, we set the following design goals to provide: