New Generation Computing, 22(2004)111-126
Ohmsha, Ltd. and Springer-Verlag
Received 30 September 2003
Revised manuscript received 26 November 2003
The availability of powerful microprocessors and improvements
in the performance of networks has enabled high performance computing on wide-area,
distributed systems. Computational grids, by integrating diverse, geographically
distributed and essentially heterogeneous resources provide the infrastructure
for solving large-scale problems. However, heterogeneity, on the one hand allows
for scalability, but on the other hand makes application development and deployment
for such an environment extremely difficult.
The field of life sciences has seen an explosion in data over the past decade.
The data acquired needs to be processed, interpreted and analyzed to be useful.
The large resource needs of bioinformatics allied to the large number of data-parallel
applications in this field and the availability of a powerful, high performance,
computing grid environment lead naturally to opportunities for developing grid-enabled
applications. This survey, done as part of the Life Sciences Research Group
(a research group belonging to the Global Grid Forum), attempts to collate information
regarding grid-enabled applications in this field.
Keywords:Grid Computing, Distributed Applications, Life Sciences.