A question of scale Bringing an existing bio-science workflow engine to the grid

The bioinformatics community is characterized by an extreme interdisciplinarity– biologists are working together with mathematicians, who are working together with physicians, who are working together with computer scientists. Along with this heterogeneous background comes a plethora of different approaches to modeling bioinformatic workflows. The tools used to tackle this challenge have long been dominated by proprietary products covering very specific areas of use. What’s even worse, a variety of proprietary formats for describing these workflows have increased the tendency to form isolated environments. Recent successes in Systems Biology and increasingly sophisticated labpractices like RNAi[1] confront the biologists with various problems of scale: