Wildfire: distributed, Grid-enabled workflow construction and execution.
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.
Tang
Francis
F
Information Science Research, Bioinformatics Institute, 30 Biopolis Street, #07-01, Matrix, 138671, Singapore. francis@bii.a-star.edu.sg
Chua
Ching Lian
CL
Ho
Liang-Yoong
LY
Lim
Yun Ping
YP
Issac
Praveen
P
Krishnan
Arun
A
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