On the performance of large scale bayesian phylogenetic analyses with grid portals and robot certificates

Motivation: ICT based Infrastructures today play a crucial role in the development of collaborations among scientists to address new global scientific challenges, particularly those that have high societal and economic impact. In the Life Science domain, for instance, the massive computational resources exposed by Grid infrastructures is indispensable when dealing both with the complexity of models and the enormous quantity of data to be processed, for example, to perform genome scale analysis or when carrying out docking simulations for the study of new drugs. At present, Grid technology is presented to end-users as a collection of virtual services and complex protocols and this makes its full exploitation very complicated. A notable step forward to foster the adoption of this technology in e-Science has recently been achieved with the adoption of portals and robot certificates. Robot certificates have been conceived and introduced to allow non expert users to access Grid Infrastructures and reduce the initial barriers. Each robot certificate is associated with a function which identifies the specific application the user wants to share with all the members of the same community. In this manuscript the solution proposed by the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics to allow bioinformaticians to access the Grid via a portal enabled by a robot certificate and perform large scale Bayesian Phylogenetic analyses is presented. The solution described in this manuscript strongly simplifies the exploitation and the utilization of Grid Infrastructures and represents a valuable step forward towards the adoption of this computing paradigm in Life Sciences.