Virtual Laboratory for Collaborative Applications

Abstract

Advanced research in life sciences calls for new information technology solutions to support complex, collaborative computer simulations and result analysis. This chapter presents the ViroLab virtual laboratory, which is an integrated system of dedicated tools and services, providing a common space for planning, building, improving and performing in-silico experiments by different groups of users. Within the virtual laboratory collaborative applications are built as experiment plans, using a notation based on the Ruby scripting language. During experiment execution, provenance data is created and stored. The virtual laboratory enables access to distributed, heterogeneous data resources, computational resources in Grid systems, clusters and standalone computers. The process of application development as well as the architecture and functionality of the virtual laboratory are demonstrated using a real-life example from the HIV treatment domain.