Not only was this time consuming, but users also ran the risk of losing their work. With prior workbench software, researchers had to search the sequence databases, select the tools they wanted to use, then sit and wait for their data to be manipulated on servers at NCSA. “We want to make sure it is easy to integrate new tools and databases into the workbench, and that all work together.”īasic data analysis has also come into its own in version 3.0. “The majority of the tools in the Biology Workbench were stand-alone programs that were integrated into the workbench environment,” said Subramaniam.
This collection of program code, subroutines, functions, and documentation makes it simple to integrate new analysis tools and new databases into the workbench. The new version of the workbench also includes the Application Programming Interface (API). Specifically, Sensei, a DNA database search program developed by States, has been incorporated into the Biology Workbench 3.0. Louis and a member of the Alliance Molecular Biology Applications Technologies team. NCSA’s development team has been working with its National Computational Science Alliance partners to integrate their tools and databases into the workbench, including a set of biological analysis tools developed by David States, a professor at the Institute for Biomedical Computing at Washington University in St. User session files stored to disk have grown from 100 MB to 4 GB during that same time because user storage was greatly expanded in the new version.
Uiuc reliability workbench upgrade#
“This is more a rewrite than an upgrade of 2.0, in terms of concept and in terms of ease of use and interoperability.”Īccording to Subramaniam, overall usage of the workbench has increased by a factor of 10 since the release of version 3.0 in March. “This is a radical change from version 2.0 the core of the Workbench is rewritten and the tools, databases and the interface include many additions and improvements,” said Shankar Subramaniam, a senior research scientist at NCSA, and head of the NCSA Biology Workbench development team and a U of I professor of biochemistry, molecular and integrative physiology, chemical engineering and electrical and computer engineering.
Version 3.0 makes using the Biology Workbench even easier. For the first time, researchers were able to access and use all the major biological information resources and analysis tools using a single Web-based interface. It tied together a wide variety of large biological and genetic sequence databases and analysis tools into a single Web-based interface.
The Biology Workbench came along and served as the ultimate integration tool. Moreover, the tools used to analyze this data had been developed independently, and not all of them were available to users at all remote locations. The new version of this Web-based virtual computing system used for the analysis of biological sequence data gives researchers a more comprehensive set of tools and allows researchers to easily add and customize those new tools for their own use.īefore the Biology Workbench was first released in June 1996, biological research data lived in databases at research labs across the world, and it was impossible to access all the data at one location or using a single interface. Since 1987 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run ThemĬhampaign, IL - The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is now making Biology Workbench 3.0 available to users at: