Using the Grid for the Interactive Workflow Management in Biomedicine

Abstract

According to the Virtual Physiological Human paradigm, integration is often required among different levels and disciplines. Large, distributed, and heterogeneous repositories, as well as computationally demanding analysis tools are more and more involved in biomedical studies. Both for storage of distributed biomedical data and metadata, and for access to distributed analysis tools, a Grid based approach may provide a shared, standardized and reliable solution. To make users able to easily access available services and data, a Grid portal has been implemented in order to hide the complexity of the framework. The portal is intended to act as Grid services provider and as Web interface for managing workflow enactment and management on the Grid. Workflows may be submitted as Grid jobs through a service based workflow engine and may be monitored during execution. As a first case study for testing workflow functionalities of the Grid portal, an application is presented for the search and the analysis of microarray data.