A grid portal with robot certificates for bioinformatics phylogenetic analyses

Grid technology and ICT-based infrastructures play a crucial role in the development of transnational multi-disciplinary collaborations and allow scientists to share a wide range of distributed computational resources, regardless of their geographical location, and address new global scientific challenges. Till now, the strict security policy requested in order to access distributed computing resources has been a limiting factor when trying to broaden the adoption of Grids by wide communities of users. There is a steep learning curve to climb before starting to gain some benefits from this new technology. Grid security is indeed based on the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) of X. 509 certificate although the procedure to get and manage those certificates is unfortunately not straightforward. A first step to make Grids more appealing for new users has recently been achieved with the adoption of robot certificates. In this paper, the solution proposed by the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics to go through the complexity of Grid security and allow bioinformaticians to perform large-scale Bayesian Phylogenetic analyses on the Grid by means of a web portal enabled by a robot certificate is presented. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.