Development of user-friendly supercomputing portal in bio research field

The RIKEN Super Combined Cluster (RSCC) System in RIKEN Wako Inst., started its operation in March, 2004. A web portal system called Bio Portal was developed to utilize a Linux cluster (a part of RSCC) for data analysis in the life sciences. A small SW server was then placed in RIKEN Yokohama Inst. for small analysis, and the Bio Portal integrates both RSCC and this SW server through the application of Grid technology. The aim of this portal system was to construct a simple data analysis environment for experimental researchers, and to improve performance of data analysis through the use of two differently performing computing resources. In this paper, we describe the web interface and functions of Bio Portal in detail. Later we explain RSCC, and discuss performance evaluations of the distribution patterns for BLAST jobs. Finally, we propose bioinformatics job distribution patterns for high throughput processing.