3. An example: the Predator plug-in

This plug-in interfaces VEGA to Predator (9), that allows the secondary structure of a protein to be predicted, starting from the primary structure. It takes as input a single protein sequence to be predicted and can optimally use a set of unaligned sequences as additional information to predict the query sequence. The mean prediction accuracy of Predator is 68% for a single sequence and 75% for a set of related sequences. As you can see, this plug-in allows to set all options of the Predator program and it gives an intuitive interface for the required operations (e.g. select the files, the databases and the sequences to be predicted).

Moreover VEGA also includes the Dhrystone plug-in . It allows the performance of your CPU to be tested. Indeed it is an old benchmark, that is included in the package as an example of the powerful VEGA plug-in system. The plug-in was developed in C/C++, using Reinhold P. Weicker's original code (10).

Finally VEGA comprises a Null plug-in: this is a simple example of a plug-in, that performs anything, but it is useful as a template to build your own plug-in.

2. Plug-in Software Development Kit (SDK)

4. PowerNet - Network interface