Enabling multi-task computation on Galaxy-based gateways using swift

The Galaxy science portal is a popular gateway to data analysis and computational tools for a broad range of life sciences communities. While Galaxy enables users to overcome the complexities of integrating diverse tools into unified workflows, it has only limited capabilities to execute those tools on the parallel and often distributed high-performance resources that the life sciences fields increasingly requires. We outline here an approach to meet this pressing requirement with the Swift parallel scripting language and its distributed runtime system. Swift's model of computation - implicitly parallel functional dataflow - is an elemental abstraction to which the core computing model of Galaxy maps very closely. We describe an integration between Galaxy and Swift that is transforming Galaxy into a much more powerful science gateway, retaining its user-friendly nature while extending its power to execute highly scalable workflows on diverse parallel environments.