A WorkFlow management system for bioinformatics grid

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we describe a Workflow Management System, named ProGenGrid (Proteomics and Genomics Grid, developed at the University of Lecce) which aims at providing a tool where e-scientists can simulate biological experiments through the composition of existing analysis and visualization tools, wrapped as Web Services. Since bioinformatics applications are compute- and data-intensive, needing clusters or many workstations to reduce the execution time, we exploit a Grid infrastructure for interconnecting wide-spread tools and hardware resources. As an example, we are considering some algorithms and tools needed for alignment of sequences, providing them as services, through easy to use Web interfaces and Web services built using the open source gSOAP Toolkit. As Grid middleware, we are using the Globus Toolkit 4.1, exploiting some protocols such as GSI and GridFTP.