The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together computer and discipline scientists, artists, humanists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, state leaders and educators for collaborations designed to reshape science, the economy, the state of North Carolina and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, networking and data technologies to ignite innovation and find solutions to previously intractable problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.

Workflows are one of the newest features of the North Carolina/TeraGrid Bioportal, a shared, extensible web portal environment developed by RENCI that brings together more than 140 computational tools and applications and many standard biological data sets. Responding to the needs of Bioportal users for broader, more sophisticated biological research capabilities, RENCI research programmers began integrating workflows into the Bioportal last year.

When using a workflow, the Bioportal user sees a single meta application wrapped in the familiar Bioportal interface. Under the hood, however, there’s a whole lot analysis going on. The Bioportal’s first workflow, called Gene2Life, captures a sequence of bioinformatics analysis steps into a single meta step, saving the user time and, quite possibly, frustration. Below is a simplified breakdown of Gene2Life operations. Over the next few months, RENCI researchers will add additional workflows to the Bioportal and fine-tune the Bioportal infrastructure to allow users to create and deploy their own customized workflows.

URL

http://www.renci.org