A Review of Scalable Bioinformatics Pipelines

Abstract

Scalability is increasingly important for bioinformatics analysis services, since these must handle larger datasets, more jobs, and more users. The pipelines used to implement analyses must therefore scale with respect to the resources on a single compute node, the number of nodes on a cluster, and also to cost-performance. Here, we survey several scalable bioinformatics pipelines and compare their design and their use of underlying frameworks and infrastructures. We also discuss current trends for bioinformatics pipeline development.