The BioinfoGRID Project

The European Commission promotes the Bioinformatics Grid Application for life science (BioinfoGRID) project. The project aims to connect many European computer centres in order to carry out Bioinformatics research and to develop new applications in the sector using a network of services based on futuristic Grid networking technology that represents the natural evolution of the Web.

Grid networking promises to be a very important step forward in the Information Technology field. Grid technology will make a global network made up of hundreds of thousands of interconnected computers possible, allowing the shared use of calculating power, data storage and structured compression of data. This goes beyond the simple communication between computers and aims instead to transform the global network of computers into a vast joint computational resource.

The BioinfoGRID White Paper

The BioinfoGRID White paper outlines guidelines and recommendations for the scientific community based on the experience and the results gained from the BioinfoGRID project.

The BioinfoGRID European project aims to promote the Bioinformatics applications for life science, in order to carry out research based on the Grid networking technology. More specifically the BioinfoGRID project evaluates applications in the fields of Genomics, Proteomics, Transcriptomics and Drug Discovery, reducing data calculation times by distributing the calculation on thousands of computers using the Grid infrastructure network created by the EGEE Project (6th Framework Program). The massive potential of Grid technology is indispensable when dealing with both the complexity of models and the enormous quantity of data, for example, in searching the human genome or when carrying out docking simulations for the study of new drugs. Users belonging to the Virtual Organisations related to the BioinfoGRID project are able to run Bioinformatics challenges on the Grid, enabling reliable in silico studies to support molecular biology. 

The BioinfoGRID white paper provides guidelines and recommendations that have been drawn from our experience over the two year period of the project. On the basis of our findings we give advice to different user communities on how to take advantage of the power of the GRID.

 Download the BioinfoGRID White Paper in pdf format (3.2MB)

The BioinfoGRID project is funded by the EU within the framework of the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6), as part of the specific programme 'Structuring the European Research Area', within the 'Research infrastructures' activity. Call name: 'Communication Network Development - eInfrastructure - Consolidating Initiatives'. Call identifier: FP6-2004-Infrastructures-6.