title: Wildfire: distributed, Grid-enabled workflow construction and execution.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  We observe two trends in bioinformatics: (i) analyses are increasing in complexity, often requiring several applications to be run as a workflow; and (ii) multiple CPU clusters and Grids are available to more scientists. The traditional solution to the problem of running workflows across multiple CPUs required programming, often in a scripting language such as perl. Programming places such solutions beyond the reach of many bioinformatics consumers.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We present Wildfire, a graphical user interface for constructing and running workflows. Wildfire borrows user interface features from Jemboss and adds a drag-and-drop interface allowing the user to compose EMBOSS (and other) programs into workflows. For execution, Wildfire uses GEL, the underlying workflow execution engine, which can exploit available parallelism on multiple CPU machines including Beowulf-class clusters and Grids.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Wildfire simplifies the tasks of constructing and executing bioinformatics workflows.
authors.affiliation: Information Science Research, Bioinformatics Institute, 30 Biopolis Street, #07-01, Matrix, 138671, Singapore. francis@bii.a-star.edu.sg
authors.forename: Francis
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.forename: Ching Lian
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Chua
authors.forename: Liang-Yoong
authors.initials: LY
authors.lastname: Ho
authors.forename: Yun Ping
authors.initials: YP
authors.lastname: Lim
authors.forename: Praveen
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Issac
authors.forename: Arun
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Krishnan
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003201:Computers; D003205:Computing Methodologies; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D030562:Databases, Protein; D005091:Exons; D006801:Humans; D019146:Hypermedia; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009862:Online Systems; D011381:Programming Languages; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D012984:Software; D012985:Software Design; D049490:Systems Biology; D018511:Systems Integration; D014018:Tissue Distribution; D014584:User-Computer Interface