Front-ends to Biomedical Data Analysis on Grids Shayan SHAHAND a Mark SANTCROOS a Yassene MOHAMMED a,d Vladimir KORKHOV a,c Angela C. M. LUYF a Antoine H. C. VAN KAMPEN a,b Silvia D. OLABARRIAGA a 1 a Bioinformatics Laboratory, Department of Clinical Epidemiology Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Academic Medical Center, PO Box 22700, 1100 DE Amsterdam, The Netherlands b Biosystems Data Analysis, Swammerdam Institute for Life Science, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam, The Netherlands c Faculty of Applied Math and Control Processes, St.Petersburg State University, Russia d Regional Computing Center for Lower Saxony and L3S, University of Hannover, Germany Abstract. The e-infrastructure for bioscience (e-BioInfra) is a platform integrating various services and middleware to facilitate access to grid resources for biomedical re- searchers at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam. In the past six years the user interfaces with the e-BioInfra have evolved from command- line interfaces to a Java desktop application, and later to an easy-to-use web applica- tion for selected biomedical data analysis. This evolution represents improvements to accommodate the requirements of a broader range of biomedical researchers and applications. In this paper we present the current user interfaces and analyse their usage considering the typical biomedical data analysis on the e-BioInfra, the roles assumed by the users in the various phases of data analysis life-cycle, and the user profiles. We observe that in order to support a wide spectrum of user profiles, with different expertise and requirements, a platform must offer a variety of user inter- faces addressed to each user profile. Keywords. science gateway, grid computing, biomedical research, e-science, grid user interface Introduction Biomedical research applications become increasingly compute-intensive and data- intensive, and as such can benefit from distributed computing infrastructures (DCI), e.g., grid computing. The e-Bioscience Infrastructure (e-BioInfra) was introduced by Olabarriaga et al. [20] to support medical image analysis on the Dutch e-science grid infrastructure. Since 2005 it has evolved into a platform integrating various services and 1 Corresponding Author: Silvia D. Olabarriaga, Bioinformatics Laboratory, Department of Clinical Epidemiology Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Academic Medical Center, PO Box 22700, 1100 DE Amsterdam, the Netherlands; ✉ e-mail: S.D.Olabarriaga@amc.uva.nl