High Performance Computing
APAC Grid Program
Bioinformatics Application Support Project
Grid-based approaches to Bioinformatics Applications for Australian Scientists
Bioinformatics activities are diverse and the user-base is varied depending on the particular life science discipline. Activities covered under bioinformatics include comparative genomic analysis (as a result of the enormous quantities of data emanating from the various genomics and functional genomics projects), proteomic data analysis, phylogenetics and molecular evolution studies, protein modelling (including protein-ligand interactions), complex systems modelling, and plant breeding. All these areas require the use of significant integrated computational resources for which GRID computing approaches are ideally suited. A coordination of bioinformatics activities across APAC partners is essential for Australia to be internationally competitive and relevant.
This project aims to implement a service oriented architecture (based on Web Services). All developments will conform to the current public standards under the Web Services banner.
Milestones of the project include:
- Establish a Grid-enabled Blast system across the APAC partners
- Develop a distributed Genome Annotation System using the Rice Genome as the model
Grendel
A bioinformatics Web service based architecture for accessing HPC resources
We have developed a system called Grendel, with the aims of providing Bioinformatics researchers transparent access to basic computational resources used in their research. Grendel is a platform and language independent Web Service based system for distributed resource management. Grendel provides a single entry point for computational tasks while keeping the actual resources transparent to the user. It also tracks the different stages of the tasks as they are executed, to allow proper monitoring and auditing.
Reference
Hunter A, Schibeci D, Hiew HL and Bellgard M, "Grendel: A bioinformatics Web Service-based architecture for accessing HPC resources" Australian Workshop on Grid Computing and e-Research (AusGrid 2005), Australian Computer Science Communications Vol 27, No 7.
