A UNICORE plugin for HPC-enabled scientific workflows in Taverna 2.2

As scientific workflows are becoming more complex and apply compute-intensive methods to increasingly large data volumes, access to HPC resources is becoming mandatory. We describe the development of a novel plugin for the Taverna workflow system, which provides transparent and secure access to HPC/grid resources via the UNICORE grid middleware, while maintaining the ease of use that has been the main reason for the success of scientific workflow systems. A use case from the bioinformatics domain demonstrates the potential of the UNICORE plugin for Taverna by creating a scientific workflow that executes the central parts in parallel on a cluster resource.