Study on bioinformatics Grid application and its supporting environment

Bioinformatics grid has emerged to meet the sharp requirement for computation and storage resource of bioinformatics research. We abstract six types of bioinformatics grid applications and analyze their features. A grid supporting environment of bioinformatics applications is tentatively put forward according to the analysis under the WSRF specification. It aggregates existing tools such as BLAST, wrapped as Web Services, through WS-ServiceGroup, and supports the development, deployment, execution and monitoring of complex bioinformatics grid application. Based on the supporting environment, applications can access bioinformatics resource in a transparent manner. This paper also presents a use case to show the workflow of the supporting environment. ? 2006 IEEE.EI