ABSTRACT
With the discovery of the structure of DNA and the development of new techniques for sequencing the entire genome of organisms, biology is rapidly
moving towards a data-intensive, computational science. Biologists search for biomolecular sequence data to compare with other known genomes in order to determine functions and improve understanding of biochemical pathways. Computational biology has been aided by recent advances in both algorithms and technology, such as the ability to sequence short contiguous strings of DNA and from these reconstruct a whole genome [1, 15, 16]. In the area of technology, high-speed micro-array gene and protein chips [12] have been developed for the study of gene expression and function determination. These high-throughput techniques have led to an exponential growth of available genomic data. As a result, the computational power needed by bioinformatics applications is growing exponentially and it is now apparent that this power will not be provided solely by traditional general-purpose processors.
