Galaxy + Hadoop: Toward a collaborative and scalable image processing toolbox in cloud

Abstract

With emergence and adoption of cloud computing, cloud has become an effective collaboration platform for integrating various software tools to deliver as services. In this paper, we present a cloud-based image processing toolbox by integrating Galaxy, Hadoop and our proprietary image processing tools. This toolbox allows users to easily design and execute complex image processing tasks by sharing various advanced image processing tools and scalable cloud computation capacity. The paper provides the integration architecture and technical details about the whole system. In particular, we present our investigations to use Hadoop to handle massive image processing jobs in the system. A number of real image processing examples are used to demonstrate the usefulness and scalability of this class of data-intensive applications. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.