An Empirical Study of Grid Applications in Life Science - Lesson learnt from Biogrid project in Japan -

Biogrid project is one of national R&D projects on grid in IT-Program granted by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology since 2002. In this project, we consider a grid technology as a glue or a middleware to integrate observation devices, databases and computational resources for advanced life science. We have built four typical applications in life science as exemplars on grid to show the power and effectiveness of the grid middleware, i.e. protein prediction, multi-scale bio-simulation, and database federation. In addition to the current grid middleware such as Globus, the secure Grid file system and IPv6 based grid middleware becomes a foundation of these advanced applications. From 2005, we will tightly collaborate with NAREGI project which is a national R&D grid middleware project stared in 2003 in terms of the development of simulation platform and datagrid middleware.