Seminar: Mark Miller, "The Next Generation Biology Workbench" (4/8/2009)

Note: A demo session will be presented after the talk. If you want to test the Next Generation Workbench, please bring your laptop!

The past decade has seen an explosion in the amount of data available to Biomedical researchers, and a corresponding explosion in the number of computational tools to analyze this data. While both assets are, for the most part, publicly available, they are often not accessible because of local limitations in computational hardware or IT support. The Next Generation Biology Workbench project was undertaken to create a portable, scalable software framework that provides simple point-and-click access to the computational hardware, software, and data that is needed for modern Biomedical research. Today the Workbench Framework is a software package designed to permit flexibility, so individual groups can install the application and tailor the features, tools, and data provided to meet their respective needs. The talk will provide an overview of the NGBW software design principles to achieve scalability, and describe the implementation of the architecture for two distinct portals: SWAMI for teaching and molecular biology (www.ngbw.org) and CIPRES for high end phylogenetics calculations (http://www.phylo.org/portal2). The talk will also cover future plans for increasing community participation and access using principles of Web 2.0 technologies, and plans to explore “cloud computing” models as a means of improving access to high end computational tools.

Note: A local version of the Next Generation Workbench running on the UH-DELL-INBRE computer cluster will be available soon through the BCB and INBRE Hawaii websites! http://bcb.ics.hawaii.edu  and  http://www.inbre.hawaii.edu/