What is my research? Contrary to what you may think, this is a difficult question for me to answer. It seems that I am often pursuing something different -- bioinformatics, parallel input/output, networking protocols, layered software architectures -- and these are only the topics of the past month.

There is a constant theme, however, "allow scientists to focus on their science and not computer science." I see the computer as a tool to solve problems, not as a problem to be solved and therefore classify myself as a person interested in computer science, and not as a computer scientist. So while I think computers are great, I am not that interested in the theory of how a computer works, I am more interested in how I can most efficiently utilize it.

The project that currently occupies my time is mpiBLAST-2.0.

mpiBLAST is an open-source parallel sequence search tool that uses several novel techniques such as, database fragmentation, query segmentation, and parallel I/O to (super-linearly) speedup NCBI BLAST. The next-generation, mpiBLAST-2.0, is an open-source parallel framework through which sequence search tools can efficiently utilize the computing resources on multiple processors.