Building and provisioning bioinformatics environments on public and private Clouds

Unlike newly developed Web applications that can be designed from the ground up to utilize cloud APIs and run natively within cloud infrastructure, most complex bioinformatics pipelines that are in advanced states of development can only be encapsulated within VMs along with all their software and data dependencies. To take advantage of the scalability offered by the cloud, additional frameworks are required to create virtualized compute clusters and emulate the most common infrastructure found on institutional resources where most of the existing bioinformatics pipelines are generally run. In this paper we describe one such framework, its compatibility with multiple Clouds and present an automated process for deploying the entire system so it can be made easily available on any Cloud.