The LabFlow System for Workflow Management in Large Scale Biology Research Laboratories

Proceedings Of The Sixth International Conference On Intelligent Systems For Molecular Biology

Volume

Proceedings Of The Sixth International Conference On Intelligent Systems For Molecular Biology

Contents

LabFlow is a workflow management system designed for large scale biology research laborato-ries. It provides a workflow model in which objects flow from task to task un-der programmatic control. The model supports parallelism, meaning that an object can flow down several paths simul-taneously, and sub-workflows which can be invoked sub-routine-style from a task. The system allocates tasks to Unix processes to achieve requisite levels of multi-processing. The system uses the LabBase data management system to store workflow-state and labo-ratory results. Lab-Flow provides a Perl5 object-oriented framework for defining workflows, and an engine for executing these. The software is freely available.