TeraGrid Open Life Science Gateway

Most tools and algorithms of high-throughput bioinformatics data analysis are CPU-intensive, requiring high-end computing resources such as the TeraGrid. To facilitate the usage of the TeraGrid resources by the Life Science community for computing and data management, we have developed an integrated cyber computational environment named Open Life Science Gateway (OLSGW). OLSGW hides the complexity of accessing the distributed TeraGrid resources from biologists and bio-informaticians, and provides them with a user friendly web-service based interface. Since the user interface of OLSGW has the similar look and feel to bioinformatics web environments that have been available to the Life Science community for years, biologists can easily use this gateway to execute their analysis programs and compose computational workflow scripts without extensive knowledge about Grid technology. This paper describes the service-oriented framework of OLSGW and how it integrates a group of bio-informati...