Deploying Bioinformatics Workflows on Clouds with Galaxy and Globus Provision

Cloud computing is attracting increasing attention as a means of providing users with fast provisioning of computational and storage resources, elastic scaling, and payas-you-go pricing. The integration of scientific workflows and Cloud computing has the potential to significantly improve resource utilization, processing speed, and user experience. This paper proposes a novel approach for deploying bioinformatics workflows in Cloud environments using Galaxy, a platform for scientific workflows, and Globus Provision, a tool for deploying distributed computing clusters on Amazon EC2. Collectively this combination of tools provides an easy to use, high performance and scalable workflow environment that addresses the needs of data-intensive applications through dynamic cluster configuration, automatic user-defined node provisioning, high speed data transfer, and automated deployment and configuration of domain-specific software. To demonstrate how this approach can be used in practice we present a domain-specific workflow use case and performance evaluation.