Grid Deployment of Legacy Bioinformatics Applications with Transparent Data Access

Although grid computing offers great potential for executing large-scale bioinformatics applications, practical deployment is constrained by legacy interfaces. Most widely deployed bioinformatics were designed long before grid computing arose, and thus are created, tested, and validated in the familiar environment of a workstation. Most perform simple local I/O and have no facility for interfacing with a distributed system. Because of these limitations, users of bioinformatics applications are generally constrained to creating large local clustered systems in order to perform data analysis. In order to deploy these applications in wide-area grid systems, users require a transparent mechanism of attaching legacy interfaces to grid I/O systems. We have explored this problem by deploying several bioinformatics databases and programs for protein sequence analysis on the European EGEE grid. Using tools for transparent adaptation, we have connected legacy applications to the logical namespac...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: GRID
• Authors: Christophe Blanchet, Rémi Mollon, Douglas Thain, Gilbert Deléage
• Keywords: Bioinformatics Applications, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Grid, GRID 2006, Large-scale Bioinformatics Applications