Radiator: A cloud-based framework for deploying re-usable bioinformatics tools

Abstract Summary Accessibility and usability of compute-intensive bioinformatics tools can be increased with simplified web-based graphic user interfaces. However, deploying such tools as web applications presents additional barriers, including the complexity of developing a usable interface, network latency in transferring large datasets, and cost, which we encountered in developing a web-based version of our command-line tool CellNet. Learning and generalizing from this experience, we have devised a lightweight framework, Radiator, to facilitate deploying bioinformatics tools as web applications. To achieve reproducibility, usability, consistent accessibility, throughput, and cost-efficiency, Radiator is designed to be deployed on the cloud. Here, we describe the internals of Radiator and how to use it. Availability and Implementation Code for Radiator and the CellNet Web Application are freely available at https://github.com/pcahan1 under the MIT license. The CellNet WebApp, Radiator, and Radiator-derived applications can be launched through public Amazon Machine Images from the cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) (https://aws.amazon.com/).