Our drug discovery project is a long term initiative to build a globally competitive lead generation system for Western Canadian universities. Notably the monetary value of a validated target is in the order of 300M CDN, however this may well be exceeded by far greater humanitarian considerations.

Ongoing research is facilitated by combined key contributions from physics, grid, network, visualization and life sciences participants plus ORANs and network engineers working together as a team. The primary enduring result will be a practical distributed life science developer framework. While the use of large packets on an explicit path network might seem a wizard's tuning trick, it represents a logical and immediately valuable benefit to grid computing and the drug discovery system overall. Extraordinary performance will be attained by having a secondary network interface on each workstation that connects directly to the explicit path system.

In the emerging next generation context, use of jumbo packets, IP packets exceeding 1500 bytes, offers an undeniable performance advantage (typically a factor of 2 at 1 Gbps and much more at higher rates), particularly when transferring large amounts of data, such as for remote collaborative visualization. Further, it becomes a requirement for scalability as our networks gradually move from 1 to 10 gigabits per second and beyond. Bringing together the raw performance of jumbo packet technology with switched explicit paths, grid computing, instrument integration and work flow orchestration sets the scene for the creation of robust next generation drug discovery systems with capabilities able to scale effectively with the impending transition to higher performance links.

The project team would like to acknowledge the generous participation and supporting infrastructure from Apparent Networks, BC Genome Sciences Centre, BCNET, Biochemistry and Microbiology at the University of Victoria, Biochemistry at the University of Alberta, Biosciences Centre at the University of Calgary, CA*net4, Centre for Subatomic Research at University of Alberta, HEPnet, IRMACS, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Simon Fraser University, Netera, Simon Fraser University, WestGrid and University of Victoria Physics.