NCBI BLAST on Windows Azure

The full name of NCBI blast is "the basic Local search tool of the National Biological Information Center" (the general locally Alignment searches Tool for the nation Center for biotechnology Information) ". The NCBI blast was created by a team of researchers working at the National Institutes of Health, a department of the United States Office of Health and Human Services. NCBI describes blast as a tool that can find similar parts between sequences. The program compares the sequence of nucleotides or proteins with the sequence database and calculates the statistical significance of the match. Blast can be used to infer the functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences, and to help identify members of the genetic family.

November 6, Microsoft announced that they provided NCBI BLAST on Windows Azure. In one demonstration, they used a project from the Children's Hospital in Seattle to test the relationship between known protein sequences. They claim that if you use a separate computer, the analysis will take six years, and NCBI blast on Windows Azure will only take a week to complete the calculation. (Note that there is no specific configuration for a "single computer".) A single supercomputing opportunity is certainly much faster than a laptop computer. In another demonstration, they analyzed the hydrogen production process in bacteria for the University of Washington. According to Microsoft, "when the local resources of the Harvard lab were unable to handle the calculation, the researchers submitted their needs to a nationwide computer cluster, but because it took up a long task queue, the request was rejected two days later." They went on to say that it took only three days to complete all the calculations on Windows Azure.

Windows Azure can run three different versions of BLAST,BLASTP, BLASTN, and Blastx. BLASTP is used to search for similar sequences in the protein database. BLASTN will do the same work on DNA sequences. BLASTX is used to compare the conceptual conversion of DNA sequences and protein sequence databases. All three applications can run on Windows Azure without change. In addition, you need to focus on the web role of the user interface and the worker roles that are assigned to work in each detached instance of the blast application.

NCBI blast on Windows Azure has been offered to a number of researchers free of charge through Microsoft's Global Cloud Research Collaboration program Indicators initiative. This project is also known as the Azure Research Project (indicators project).

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