Porting PHYLIP phylogenetic package on the Desktop GRID platform XtremWeb-CH

This paper describes the parallelization (gridification) of the phylogenetic package PHYLIP on a desktop GRID platform termed XtremWeb-CH. PHYLIP is a package of programs for inferring phylogenies (evolutionary trees). It is the most widely-distributed phylogeny package. PHYLIP has been used to build the largest number of published trees. It's known that some modules of PHYLIP are CPU time consuming; their sequential version can not be applied to a large number of sequences. XtremWeb-CH (XWCH) is a software system that makes it easier for scientists and industrials to deploy and execute their parallel and distributed applications on a public-resource computing infrastructure. Universities, research centres and private companies can create their own XWCH platform while anonymous PC owners can participate to these platforms. They can specify how and when their resources could be used. The objective of XWCH is to develop a real High Performance Peer-To-Peer platform with a distributed scheduling and communication system. The main idea is to build a completely symmetric model where nodes can be providers and consumers at the same time. In this paper we describe the porting, deployment, and execution of some PHYLIP modules on the XWCH platform. The parallelized version of PHYLIP is used to generate evolutionary tree related to HIV viruses.