Scalable BLAST Service in OBIGrid Environment

OBIGrid [1, 2, 3, 4] is a grid environment composed of 27 organizations aimed for bioinformatics research, established by the Initiative for Parallel Bioinformatics (IPAB) and high performance biocomputing committee. The available computational resource at present (Oct. 2003) is as large as 492 CPU with 293 nodes over the Internet connected by virtual private net (VPN). Those resources are increasing year by year. As increasing the amount of genome sequence information, more and more computational power is required especially for sequence matching such as BLAST search and DP matching. Parallel processing techniques are definitely helpful for this purpose. However, maximum computation power one can supply in his(her) institute is limited by physical conditions, such as lack of electronic power supply and machine room space, research budget and maintenance cost including manpower. In order to overcome this limitation and to avoid overinvestment by an institute, grid is one of the most attractive and promising approaches currently available. In this study, we demonstrate how to make use of current grid technologies for bioinformatics applications by choosing BLAST (“OBIBlast”) as the first example.