Architecture of a grid-enabled research platform with location-transparency for bioinformatics

The recent advance in information technologies has bought about the borderlessness in every field of both science and business. The borderlessness has increasingly made activities in interdisciplinary field more important. This current situation produces a strong demand that people want to establish a virtual group, organization and society for their business and scientific purposes irrespective of the actual structure formed by organizations. Remarkably, bio sciences require a research platform that satisfies such demand for further development. In this paper, we present a research platform for bioinformatics in detail. The prominent feature of the research platform is the use of Grid and its location transparency, which means that bio scientists and researchers are able to utilize a large amount of computational power for their analysis and to access data of their interest without being aware of where data and computational resources are located. The usefulness and feasibility of the architecture of the research platform is shown as well as future issues to achieve toward the final goal of our research in this paper.