Abstract

A programmable Java distributed system, which utilises the free resources of a heterogeneous set of computers linked together by a network, has been developed. The system has been successfully deployed on over 200 computers, which were distributed over a number of locations, and has been successfully used to process bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, and cryptography applications. We present two bioinformatics applications, DSEARCH, which performs sensitive database and DPRml which performs distributed phylogeny reconstruction by maximum likelihood.