Evolutionary biology and computational grids

Abstract

The global high performance computing community has seen two overarching changes in the past five years. One of these changes was the consolidation toward SMP clusters as the predominant HPC system architecture. The other change was the emergence of computing grids as an important architecture in high performance computing. Several major national and international projects are now underway to develop grid technologies. Computational grids will increase the resources available to the most advanced computational scientists and encourage the use of advanced techniques by researchers who have not traditionally employed such technologies. In the latter camp are bioinformaticists in general and evolutionary biologists in particular, although this situation is changing rapidly.