A Decentralized Method for Scaling Up Genome Similarity Search Services.

Abstract-As genome sequence databases grow in size, the accuracy and speed of sequence similarity detection have become more important. Over the last few years, a number of methods have been introduced for detecting sequence similarity. Also, the demands for genome sequence search and alignment services have also increased. It is a tremendous challenge to scale up computer systems so that they can host various methods and service requests to these methods in a timely manner. Traditional clusters, which are used in most scientific centers today, cannot cope with this challenge very well. This paper tackles this problem in a novel way, which treats sequence search requests as content requests to both genome databases and similarity detection methods. Therefore, scaling up the computer systems that serve these contents is a a process of constructing a content distribution network (CDN). This paper proposes a decentralized method to dynamically construct CDNs for a variety of genome sequence similarity detection services. This paper also provides a scheduling algorithm for the efficient use of content nodes. The simulation study shows that scalability arid high content node utilization can be achieved in such a system t a reasonable cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]