Big-Data Approaches for Bioinformatics Workflows: A Comparative Assessment

There is a big-data explosion in the field of bioinformatics, with the rapid growth in the size of biological data. In bioinformatics, workflows are used to integrate and analyze biological data. Orchestration and choreography are the two approaches used to execute bioinformatics workflows. However, big-data poses several challenges in these approaches. One of the challenges is how to handle the movement of big-data during workflow execution. With the advent of big-data, a number of modified orchestration and choreography approaches have also been developed to handle big-data. In this paper, we review and make a comparative assessment of the state-of-the-art approaches to execute bigdata workflows. We examine the big-data handling in these approaches and finally recommend a solution that could be a way forward in executing big-data bioinformatics workflows.