EMASGRID: An NBBnet Grid Initiative for a Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Services Infrastructure in Malaysia

摘要

The plethora of bioinformatics tools currently available to the biologist, and the diversity of problems that these applications were designed to solve, has necessitated a look at providing a single environment which can serve as an interface to these many applications. At the same time, this environment should also be able to function as an infrastructure resource with adequate computational capacity to solve the data volume which is currently available from numerous genomics projects. We discuss the setting up of a national level infrastructure initiative which utilizes grid computing technology to serve geographically distributed users in Malaysia. This infrastructure was designed to provide access to high performance computational resources made available by Sun Microsystem's Sun Grid Engine (SGE) using different interfaces which access a pipeline of bioinformatics software. The underlying computer system, such as operating systems and high performance computing applications, were bypassed with the creation of an application layer of bioinformatics tools (BioGrappler) or by accessing the compute resources by the Grid Engine Portal (BioBox).