Microbase is an e-Science framework for compute and data intensive task management and execution. The project is funded by the BBSRC and the DTI under the e-Science and bioinformatics initiative and developed by the Integrative Bioinformatics Team, in the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University.

Microbase-Lite was our evolutionary prototype system that has now been superceded by the current Microbase (v1) project. There are two major outputs of the current project. The core Microbase system and the Aga genome comparison system. Microbase core system is a generic set of service oriented components. These components have been used to construct Aga, but can be used for any bioinformatics task (and indeed tasks outside of bioinformatics) that requires the co-ordinated execution of jobs within a high-performance Grid environment.

Microbase employs grid technology and is therefore particularly suitable for data intensive and compute intensive problems. The system not only provides a method to farm out compute tasks on a Grid, but uses bit torrents and distributed databases to tackle the issue of distributing the resources required for jobs to run on remote nodes and the rapid assimilation of large datasets that are generated by these jobs.

This site describes the generic Microbase toolkit and documents the way it has been used to build Aga giving examples of how you can adapt the Microbase system to you own applications.

Microbase is an open source project and we actively enourage new developers to join the project. Please see our sourceforge page for further details.

Click here to find out about the Microbase installation used to construct the Aga system, hosted at Newcastle University.

This site is under active construction, thanks for your patience.