The Application Hosting Environment 3.0: Simplifying biomedical simulations using RESTful web services

Grid middleware and the computational infrastructure that sits beneath it still present a steep learning curve for ordinary scientific end users. Subsequent to the development of grid computing has been the rise of cloud computing, further complicating the process of using third-party computation to execute biomedical simulations. In this paper, we present the Application Hosting Environment 3.0, which virtualizes grid applications and exposes the functionalities through a simple and concise RESTful web service interface. This simple interface allows grid deployed applications to be accessed through simple HTTP calls, meaning that users can easily integrate such applications into more complicated workflow. We also describe how AHE 3.0 is being integrated into a wider biomedical simulation infrastructure, to allow users to seamlessly access cloud and high performance computing resources.