Services Oriented Architecture for Managing Workflows of Avian Flu Grid

The avian flu grid is a virtual organization dedicated to the discovery of novel inhibitors for the pandemic avian flu threat, leveraging grid technologies and computational resources provided by PRAGMA and its partners. In this context it is essential to adopt tools which increase the productivity of the computational scientists without advanced training on grid technologies. To reduce the learning curve, we have augmented tools that most domain scientists are already familiar with, and hidden the complexity of the underlaying infrastructure, through automatic user interface generation and workflow support, beyond the standard command line based approach. Here we describe the current state of the infrastructure deployed and how it has facilitated the training of new researchers in the drug discovery area. We provide details on Vision, a visual programming environment used to define scientific workflows, and Opal, an automatic Web service wrappers for scientific applications on Grid resources, and how they are integrated with other established back-end technologies.