Global computing for bioinformatics
Started evolution@home, the first global computing system for evolutionary biology, and continues to develop it.
Laurence Loewe, Microbial Ecology Group, Department of Biosciences, Technische Universität München, Weihenstephaner Berg 3, 85354 Freising, Germany Tel.: +49 (8161) 71 3851 Fax.: +49 (8161) 71 4492 E-mail: Laurence.Loewe{at}evolutionary-research.net
Global computing, the collaboration of idle PCs via the Internet in a SETI@home style, emerges as a new way of massive parallel multiprocessing with potentially enormous CPU power. Its relations to the broader, fast-moving field of Grid computing are discussed without attempting a review of the latter. This review (i) includes a short table of milestones in global computing history, (ii) lists opportunities global computing offers for bioinformatics, (iii) describes the structure of problems well suited for such an approach, (iv) analyses the anatomy of successful projects and (v) points to existing software frameworks. Finally, an evaluation of the various costs shows that global computing indeed has merit, if the problem to be solved is already coded appropriately and a suitable global computing framework can be found. Then, either significant amounts of computing power can be recruited from the general public, or — if employed in an enterprise-wide Intranet for security reasons — idle desktop PCs can substitute for an expensive dedicated cluster.
Keywords: global computing, Internet distributed computing, Grid, in silico biology, simulations, structure prediction