Grid-Based Biological Computation Service Environment

This paper puts forward a novel concept of “Grid-based biological computation environment”. In this environment, distributed, heterogeneous computer nodes, as long as they installed biological computation software and are willing to share them for public use, can be aggregated seamlessly into a powerful computational Grid to provide on-demand computation services. Just with the widely available Web browser, biology researchers can conveniently perform highly customized computation jobs. To date, a prototype system is developed and a number of pragmatic biological applications are exploited.