Creating a Cloud-based Life Science Gateway

Cloud computing is increasingly becoming a popular solution to massive data analysis in life science community. To completely harness the power of Cloud computing, scientists need science gateways to efficiently manage their virtual machines, share Cloud resources, and run high-throughput sequence analysis with bioinformatics software tools. This paper introduces the development and use of Open Life Science Gateway, which manages computational jobs on top of Hadoop streaming, and supports user-customized runtime environment with virtual machine images. Moreover, it facilitates researchers to team up on solving challenging computing problems by sharing Cloud based data sources and software tools. This gateway has been used for investigating better B-cell epitope prediction.