The Bioportal is designed to train students and to empower researchers and provides both access to applications and a collaborative environment. Developed using the Open Grid Computing Environment (OGCE) portal toolkit, this is a shared, extensible bioinformatics portal. The bioportal can be deployed on any linux system and is currently deployed as the NC Bioportal and over TeraGrid resources. The portal may be customized by each site but a typical delployment would provide access to over one hundred bioinformatics applications, access to cluster computational resources, secure access to remote files through GridFTP, desktop and collaboratory tools, such as calendar, bookmarks and news, and job management tools, with the ability to monitor jobs and save your results.

The app is developed by the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Coincidentally their director, Daniel A. Reed, recently presented in Second Life on talk on the future of technology and the 3-D net.