Grendel: A bioinformatics Web Service-based architecture for accessing HPC resources

Bioinformatics is an important application area for grid computing. Bioinformatics applications exported over a grid have the potential to facilitate transparent access to high performance computing (HPC) resources to a range of stakeholders. These stakeholders include application users, application developers, system administrators as well as service providers. In this paper we describe a Web Service based system called Grendel. Grendel acts as a single access point to HPC and is used to explore gridenablement issues for bioinformatics tools. It uses a language and platform independent mechanism for remotely interacting with the HPC environment. In this paper, we provide details of Grendel’s architecture as well as lessons learnt in developing and deploying the system.