Yabi: A Sophisticated Online Research Environment for Grid, High Performance and Cloud Computing

Access to significant computing infrastructure is now essential in many fields of research including life sciences to process and analyse the large amount of data that omics instruments generate such as next generation DNA sequencers. We developed Yabi a web-based workflow and data analysis environment that enables researchers to access a range of computational tools and workflows for genomics, proteomics and metabolomics studies. Yabi provides researches a drag-and-drop workflow creation environment that significantly simplifies the combining of instruments, data and analysis tools. It also enables the easy and transparent sharing of data and custom workflows within groups in the same lab, institute, university, country, etc. More importantly to run the required computational tasks Yabi enables access to High Performance Computing (HPC) and Grid resources available in any location locally and/or internationally. The process of installation and customization of Yabi has been simplified to respond to the various needs that different research groups may have. Yabi has been utilized to evaluate miR-seq, RNA-seq, metagenomics, proteomics among other datasets.