Center for Bioinformatics and Molecular Biostatistics

Many computations in biomedical research such as simulations, bootstrapping, database searches (such as BLAST), and many Monte Carlo algorithms are embarrassingly parallel. This means that the computation can be split up into smaller computations; each of those calculations can be performed in parallel threads that do not need to interact with each other. Computations with this feature can be easily distributed,(that is, run on different computer processors), with a gain in speed that is approximately proportional to the number of processors. In this note we introduce some of the concepts behind distributed computing, examples where they have been used, and lay out scenarios where they may be useful for biomedical researchers in the future.