ABCGrid: Application for Bioinformatics Computing Grid

We have developed a package named Application for Bioinformatics Computing Grid (ABCGrid). ABCGrid was designed for biology laboratories to use heterogeneous computing resources and access bioinformatics applications from one master node. ABCGrid is very easy to install and maintain at the premise of robustness and high performance. We implement a mechanism to install and update all applications and databases in worker nodes automatically to reduce the workload of manual maintenance. We use a backup task method and self-adaptive job dispatch approach to improve performance. Currently, ABCGrid integrates NCBI_BLAST, Hmmpfam and CE, running on a number of computing platforms including UNIX/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. AVAILABILITY: The source code, executables and documents can be downloaded from http://abcgrid.cbi.pku.edu.cn