A Web application to publish R scripts as-a-Service on a Cloud computing platform

Prototype scripting is the base of most models in computational biology and environmental sciences. Scientists making prototype scripts (e.g. using R and Matlab) often need to share results and make their models used also by other scientists on new data. To this aim, one way is to publish scripts as-a-Service, possibly under a recognized standard (e.g. the Web Processing Service of the Open Geospatial Consortium). Unfortunately, prototype scripts are not generally meant to be transformed into Web services, which require managing multi-tenancy, concurrency etc. Often, porting prototype scripts to more efficient programming languages is not affordable, because this operation demands for time, competencies and money. For this reason, Web services are becoming smart enough to integrate prototype scripts directly and possibly make them run efficiently (e.g. WPS4R ). In this paper, we present an interface (Statistical Algorithms Importer, SAI) that allows scientists to easily and quickly import R scripts onto a distributed e-Infrastructure, which publishes the scripts as-a-Service and manages multi-tenancy and concurrency. Additionally, it allows scientists to update their scripts without following long software re-deploying procedures each time. SAI relies on the D4Science e-Infrastructure , a distributed computer system supporting large-scale resource sharing and Cloud computing, via the definition of Virtual Research Environments (VREs).