To date Grid development has focused on the basic issues of storage, computation and resource management needed to make a global scientific community's information and tools accessible in a high performance environment. However, from an e-Science viewpoint, the purpose of the Grid is to deliver a collaborative and supportive environment that allows geographically distributed scientists to achieve research goals more effectively. MyGrid aims to design, develop and demonstrate higher level functionalities over an existing Grid infrastructure that support scientists in making use of complex distributed resources
myGrid is a research project that will extend the Grid framework of distributed computing, producing a virtual laboratory workbench that will serve the life sciences community. The integration environment will support patterns of scientific investigation that include:
Scientists will have the ability to customize the work environment to reflect their preferences for resource selection, data management and process enactment. MyGrid's applicability to the bioinformatics community will be tested through use cases our academic and industry partners develop. Minimally, the environment will be able to support activities relating to the analysis of functional genomic data and the annotation of pattern databases.