InfraPhenoGrid: A scientific workflow infrastructure for plant phenomics on the Grid

Plant phenotyping consists in the observation of physical and biochemical traits of plant genotypes in response to environmental conditions. Challenges, in particular in context of climate change and food security, are numerous. High-throughput platforms have been introduced to observe the dynamic growth of a large number of plants in different environmental conditions. Instead of considering a few genotypes at a time (as it is the case when phenomic traits are measured manually), such platforms make it possible to use completely new kinds of approaches. However, the datasets produced by such widely instrumented platforms are huge, constantly augmenting and produced by increasingly complex experiments, reaching a point where distributed computation is mandatory to extract knowledge from data. In this paper, we introduce InfraPhenoGrid, the infrastructure we designed and deploy to efficiently manage datasets produced by the PhenoArch plant phenomics platform in the context of the French Phenome Project. Our solution consists in deploying scientific workflows on a Grid using a middleware to pilot workflow executions. Our approach is user-friendly in the sense that despite the intrinsic complexity of the infrastructure, running scientific workflows and understanding results obtained (using provenance information) is kept as simple as possible for end-users. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.