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Russian Segment
BioRgrid
There are 3 directions of our efforts in Grid activity:
1. Grid for Genomics and Proteomics.
The first biological application in Russian Grid was BLAST in Genomics problems solution. We have investigated the possibility and expediency of BLAST using on the Grid with Globus and EDG middleware in cooperation with Institute for Molecular Biology in framework of the State Program "Human Genome". Bioinformatics Centre of mentioned institute has its computational cluster based on multitude of Windows PCs. This Windows cluster and our Linux cluster constitute together a heterogeneous environment that is very suitable for Grid experiments.
A series of Blast on Grid experiments showed clearly that such a heterogeneous Grid segment could successfully provide the very high performance for big tasks of Computational Genomics reducing the calculation period up to 10 times.
There are also other close related fields in which we are in the course of experiments using Grid infrastructure and middleware. There are Proteomics problems - 3D modeling of high-mass molecules of proteins. Besides, there is one more biological problem that is investigated presently in order to use Computational Grid - Monte-Carlo modeling space distribution of sub-cell structures. At last, the similar problems of polymers investigation are in course of Grid experiment in Organic Chemistry that close related to Biology.
2. Distributed Biomedical Databases.
There is another important area of Grid applications - distributed biomedical databases. This field of investigation is called also "Data-intensive Grid" in order to emphasize that the central point is not heavy calculations but data mining and transferring. TC "Science and Society" builds in cooperation with Institute for Chemical Physics and several medical and biological institutions such a software/hardware structure in order to use Grid advantages in this problem. This investigation is carrying out in framework of the State Program "New Generation of Vaccines and Medical Diagnostic Systems". More than 10 biomedical distributed databases were developed and setup on Moscow Grid segment. At the moment we carry out researches of concept, architecture and key algorithms to create a "Knowledge Network" that will provide an intellectual data mining over Grid infrastructures.
3. Medical Imaging
This part of biomedical Grid applications is at initial stage at the moment. In cooperation with National Research Centre for Surgery we prepare two applications for testing on Moscow Grid segment - ultrasound tomography and mammography. In presence of known algorithms and even software packages of data processing the main problem is a "smooth connection" between medical scanners and Grid. Development of these interfaces in accordance with EU DataGrid specifications is the main task at the moment.
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