Dynamic BLAST

Molecular biologists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) use gene databases published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and locally developed databases to guide their search for genetic similarities in research subjects. The NCBI Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is a broadly available tool that finds regions of local similarity between sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches. NCBI BLAST can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families. The basic function of BLAST is to find similarities between a short query sequence and a large database of infrequently changing information such as DNA sequences. With the ever-growing size of the search databases, the need to increase the speed of query searches becomes critical. The emerging Grid computing technology, based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services, provides an ideal development platform to take advantage of the distributed computational resources. The UAB Department of Computer and Information Sciences in conjunction with the UAB Office of Information Technology have developed a grid meta-scheduler and web-based interface to improve performance and simplify the execution of BLAST searches across grid resources for the UAB research community.

You can find out more information on Dynamic BLAST at Enis Afgane's research page and the UAB CIS Collaborative Computing Lab

If you are a member of the UAB community and have completed your UABgrid registration, the you can access the current version of the UABgrid BLAST web interface. This proces will show you the web interface and how job executing can be managed using this interface. The interfaces currently does not complete BLAST query execution because we are transitioning the back end to use the DynamicBLAST meta-scheduler to enable simplifed job scheduling accross and expanded set of resources. Please check back here for updates on our transition to UABgrid 2.0.