Wildfire: distributed, Grid-enabled workflow construction and execution

Background: We observe two trends in bioinformatics: ( i) analyses are increasing in complexity, often requiring several applications to be run as a workflow; and ( ii) multiple CPU clusters and Grids are available to more scientists. The traditional solution to the problem of running workflows across multiple CPUs required programming, often in a scripting language such as perl. Programming places such solutions beyond the reach of many bioinformatics consumers. Results: We present Wildfire, a graphical user interface for constructing and running workflows. Wildfire borrows user interface features from Jemboss and adds a drag-and-drop interface allowing the user to compose EMBOSS ( and other) programs into workflows. For execution, Wildfire uses GEL, the underlying workflow execution engine, which can exploit available parallelism on multiple CPU machines including Beowulf-class clusters and Grids. Conclusion: Wildfire simplifies the tasks of constructing and executing bioinformatics workflows.