Name:BiG (GISELA)
Description:Blast in Grids
Abstract:One of the most important efforts on the analysis of the genome is the study of the functionality of the different genes and regions. Sequence alignments provide a powerful way to compare novel sequences with previously characterized genes. Both functional and evolutionary information can be inferred from well designed queries and alignments. The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) finds regions of local similarity between sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches.<BR/>This process of finding homologous sequences is a very computationally intensive process. The size of the databases currently available (Non-redundant Gene Bank, SwissProt, etc.) increases daily, reaching the size of more than 1 GB. Searching alignment of a single sequence is not a costly task but normally thousands of sequences are searched at the same time.<BR/>There are open-source versions of BLAST and even parallel-computing versions of it (mpiBLAST). Those applications can be easily installed and executed locally, but their computational requirements make them adequate for their use on Grids. The Biocomputing community usually relies on either local installations or public servers, such as the NCBI or the gPS@, but the limitations on the number of simultaneous queries make this environment inefficient for large tests. Moreover, since the databases are periodically updated, it will be convenient to periodically update the results of previous studies. <BR/>The BiG Service is versatile and the user interface can be used from a stand-alone application, from a web portal or from the web-service. In all cases, the inner behaviour is the same, structuring, creating and launching the jobs in the Grid for authenticated users and using the general Grid infrastructure services.<BR/>BiG is being modified to deal with parallel and sequential computing kernels. The choice of the rightmost kernel depends on the user needs and the job size. BiG provides b

Created:2011-05-04
Last updated:2011-05-04