Can the Grid help to solve the data integration problems in molecular biology?

Abstract

Molecular biology is increasingly relying on globally distributed information repositories. The quality and performance of research and development in this field will depend on highly flexible, performant and intuitive ways of accessing and integrating these resources into local information processing environments. In contrast to many ongoing Grid developments, the molecular biology community requires high-informational as opposed to high-performance computing Grids. This paper outlines a general distributed informational computing scenario in the context of molecular biology. It focuses on information integration (data warehousing) and data mining as two crucial Grid methodologies of future molecular biology computing environments. The presented scenario raises a number of questions, as the basis for discussion, on the role of emerging Grid technologies.