From Dedicated Grid to Volunteer Grid: Large Scale Execution of a Bioinformatics Application

Large volunteer desktop platforms are now available for several kind of applications. More and more scientists consider this type of computing power as an alternative to the classical platforms such as dedicated clusters aggregated into Grids. This paper presents the work we did to run the first phase of the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project to run on World Community Grid. The project was launched on December 19, 2006, and took 26 weeks to complete. During this time frame, 123 GB of results were produced by volunteers who share their idle CPU time to compute a cross docking experiment over 168 proteins. We present performance evaluation of the overall execution and compare the World Community Grid volunteer Grid with a dedicated one.