On Design and Implementation of a Bioinformatics Portal in Cluster and Grid Environments*

Over last few years, interest on biotechnology has increased dramatically. With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome, such interest is likely to expand even more rapidly. The size of genetic information database doubles every 14 months, overtaxing any existing computational tool for data analysis. There is a persistent and continuous search for new alternatives or new technologies, all with the common goal of improving overall performance. Grid infrastructures are characterized by interconnecting a number of heterogeneous hosts through the internet, by enabling large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional boundaries. In this paper, we present BioPortal, a web-based portal, BioPortal, that integrates a number of well-known bioinformatics tools for cluster and grid environments. The major reason in developing such interface is to assist biologists and geneticists, as also biology students and investigators, to access to high performance computing without introducing any additional drawback, in order to accelerate their experimental and sequence data analysis. The development of BioPortal depends solely on freely available software technologies, such as Apache, PHP, and Linux OS. * This research is partially supported by National Science Council, Taiwan, under grant NSC94-2213-E-126-005, and National Center for High Performance Computing – Grid Operation Center, Taiwan. Paper candidate to the “Best Student Paper Award”