Programming Ecological Niche Modeling Workflows in the Cloud

Abstract

In the last decades biology scientists have relied on their own resources and tools to run the experiments and store the results of the analysis. However, the explosion of big data and the growing availability of computational methods find an obstacle in the lack of computational and storage resources. Cloud computing platforms are emerging as potential solution to overcome these limitations, but adaptation of the applications to enable scientific users to benefit from resources acquired on demand is a complex process requiring multidisciplinary expertise. The EUBrazilOpenBio initiative is implementing an e-Infrastructure that provides biodiversity community with a rich set of computational and data resources exploiting existing cloud technologies from EU and Brazil. This paper presents the implementation of one of the two use cases selected, the environmental niche modeling by means of implementing such workflow through the COMPSs framework and its deployment on the EUBrazil OpenBio platform. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a Cloud test bed managed by the VENUS-C middleware.