Leveraging Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Massive Biological Datasets

The tremendous increase in available data in bioinformatics necessitates computational approaches which leverage a wide variety of computing resources. These systems must be easy for the user and add minimal overhead for developers. Developers must also take advantage of these systems and build tools and applications which are highly portable and have low overheads while being capable of running on a large variety of resources. To this end, we present multiple applications and modifications with lessons learned and guidelines for development. Additionally these applications provide useful modifications to the community. Finally we provide a use case which leverages distributed computing and without which, would be computationally infeasible.