Extending the Galaxy portal with parallel and distributed execution capability

The Galaxy platform is a web-based science portal for scientific computing supporting the life sciences user community. While user-friendly and intuitive for doing small to medium-scale computations, it currently has limited support for large-scale parallel and distributed computing. The Swift parallel scripting framework is capable of composing ordinary applications into parallel scripts that can be run on multiscale distributed and performance computing platforms. In complex distributed environments, often the user end of the application lifecycle slows because of the technical complexities brought in by the scale, access methods, and resource management nuances. Galaxy offers a simple way of designing, composing, executing, reusing, and reproducing application runs. An integration between the Swift and Galaxy systems can accelerate science as well as bring the respective user communities together in an interactive, userfriendly, parallel and distributed data analysis environment enabled on a broad range of computational infrastructures.