A Split & Merge Data Management Architecture for a Grid Environment

Currently several applications produce huge amount of data making them available for post-processing operations in order to infer new knowledge. Main issues of these applications are the need for efficient mechanisms to access data and high performance computing to obtain the results in an acceptable time. Wrapping the applications as Web services allows interoperability with others tools and in particular with grid computing environments exploiting a large set of resources through a standard interface, to support the requirements of so-called "data intensive" applications that handle large amounts of data. This paper presents the architecture of a complex data managements system leveraging the grid computing paradigm, exploiting existing middleware developed at the University of Lecce within the ProGenGrid, GReIC and GRB projects to support high throughput applications. This architecture has been specialized for a bioinformatics domain and a case study of the use of a biological application will be also described