bioinformatics grid

Motivation: Grid computing is used to solve large-scale bioinformatics problem with gigabytes database by distributing the computation across multiple platforms. But up to now in developing bioinformatics grid applications, it is extremely tedious to design and implement the component algorithms and parallelization techniques for different classes of problems, and to access remotely located sequence database files of varying formats across the grid. Herein, we propose a grid programming toolkit, GLAD (Grid Life sciences Applications Developer), to facilitate the development and deployment of bioinformatics applications on a grid. Results: GLAD has been developed using ALiCE (Adaptive scaLable Internet-based Computing Engine), a Java-based grid middleware, which exploits taskbased parallelism. Two bioinformatics benchmark applications, distributed sequence comparison and distributed progressive multiple sequence alignment, have been developed using GLAD. Availability: GLAD and ALiCE are available a