Map-Reduce Expansion of the ISGA Genomic Analysis Web Server

Biological sequence data can be subjected to a variety of analysis workflows to glean pertinent scientific insight. Recent advances in sequencing techniques have led to a deluge of biosequence data, which necessitates the use of high-performance computing resources in order to carry out analysis in a reasonable period of time. The tasks involved in creating and managing these computational jobs, though, can be daunting to typical biology researchers, which has lead to the emergence of portal software architectures that abstract many of the details in building and executing computational pipelines. This paper presents a brief overview of one of these genome annotation servers, Integrative Services for Genomics Analysis (ISGA), and then describes a simple extension to the underlying workflow system that leverages the powerful Twister Iterative Map-Reduce runtime for streamlined dataparallel job control and enhanced access to clusters, grids, and Cloud resources. The accompanying live demonstration will showcase ISGA’s Workbench for submitting independent BLAST jobs as well as the use of the Twister interface to expand resource access for this utility. Keywords-biosequence; bioinformatics; ISGA; BLAST; Twister; map-reduce; genome annotation