Extending the Galaxy portal with parallel and distributed execution capability

The Galaxy platform is a web-based science portal for sci-entific computing supporting the life sciences user commu-nity. While user-friendly and intuitive for doing small to medium-scale computations, it currently has limited sup-port for large-scale parallel and distributed computing. The Swift parallel scripting framework is capable of composing ordinary applications into parallel scripts that can be run on multiscale distributed and performance computing plat-forms. In complex distributed environments, often the user end of the application lifecycle slows because of the technical complexities brought in by the scale, access methods, and resource management nuances. Galaxy offers a simple way of designing, composing, executing, reusing, and reproduc-ing application runs. An integration between the Swift and Galaxy systems can accelerate science as well as bring the respective user communities together in an interactive, user-friendly, parallel and distributed data analysis environment enabled on a broad range of computational infrastructures