PackageBLAST: an adaptive multi-policy grid service for biological sequence comparison

In this paper, we propose an adaptive task allocation framework to perform BLAST searches in a grid environment against sequence database segments. The framework, called PackageBLAST, provides an infrastructure to choose or incorporate task allocation strategies. Furthermore, we propose a mechanism to compute grid nodes execution weight, adapting the chosen allocation policy to the current computational power of the nodes. Our results present very good speedups and also show that no single allocation strategy is able to achieve the lowest execution times for all scenarios.