A portal interface to my Grid workﬂow technology Stefan Rennick Egglestone a , M.Nedim Alpdemir b , Chris Greenhalgh a , Arijit Mukherjee c and Ian Roberts d a. School of Computer Science and IT, University of Nottingham b. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester c. School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne d. Department of Computer Science, University of Shefﬁeld Abstract Workﬂow technology previously developed by the my Grid project has been used to au- tomate a number of complex bioinformatics analyses, allowing much larger volumes of data to be produced than would be possible if these analyses were to be performed manu- ally. my Grid workﬂows can be constructed using the Taverna workbench, and the analysis speciﬁed by such a workﬂow can be performed throught the use of a workﬂow enactment engine. This paper describes the design and implementation of a simple user-interface which aims to support the use of workﬂow technology by providing web-based access to workﬂow and results management facilities. This interface has been constructed using the Gridsphere portal framework, and makes use of storage facilities provided by the my Grid Information Repository. 1 Introduction A rich selection of computational resources are available to scientists working with biological data. It is common for these scientists to wish to per- form composite analyses involving multiple re- sources, and the my Grid project has developed workﬂow-based middleware which allows the per- formance of such analyses to be automated. De- velopment of this middleware has focussed on providing support for professional bioinformati- cians, who are likely to be expert computer users, and who may wish to automate complex analyses involving the use of large numbers of resources. However, workﬂow techniques may also be use- ful for experimental biologists, who are often less expert in computing, and who may wish to auto- mate simpler analyses. Members of this second group of users are un- likely to wish to construct their own workﬂows, but may wish to use workﬂows which have been constructed by other, more expert users. To sup- port this scenario, the my Grid project have devel- oped the my Grid Portal Interface (MPI), which is a simpliﬁed, web-based interface to my Grid workﬂow enactment and storage technology. The MPI provides functionality which allows groups of users to share and enact a number of work- ﬂows, and to browse data which has been pro- duced by previous workﬂow enactments. This paper describes the design and implementa- tion of the MPI, and is structured as follows: Sec- tion 2 describes the use of workﬂow technology to automate biological analyses, and motivates the development of the MPI. Section 3 describes general details of the design and implementation of the MPI, and section 4 describes a number of interesting features of this design in more detail. Section 5 then discusses improvements that could be made in the design of the MPI, and in partic- ular those that might be made to support the re- quirements of large groups of users who wish to publish many workﬂows. 2 Motivation for the development of the MPI 2.1 A categorization of users of bioinformat- ics resources A wide variety of resources are available which support the storage, retrieval and processing of biological data. These resources are often publicly- and freely-available, and have become essential tools for scientists who work with this type of data.