The Grid revisited

When Cyberbiochemist first looked at the Grid, 4 years ago, the term will not have entered the vocabulary of most bio chemists. It was the more numbercrunching disciplines, such as highenergy physics and fluid dynamics, which first em braced this much hyped ‘secondgeneration Internet’; career bioinformaticians were not far behind. Most biochemists and molecular biologists, however, whose experience of the computational side of their discipline is restricted to the occasional BLAST run or simple molecular visualization, have unsurprisingly been slower to see what these new developments might have to offer them. Now, 4 years on, it is useful to look into what practical use the Grid can be to the majority of Biochemist readers, who will never design a Hidden Markov Model or run a multinanosecond Molecular Dynamics simulation.