Cloudflow - A framework for MapReduce pipeline development in Biomedical Research

The data-driven parallelization framework Hadoop MapReduce allows analysing large data sets in a scalable way. Since the development of MapReduce programs can be a time-intensive and challenging task, the application and usage of Hadoop in Biomedical Research is still limited. Here we present Cloudflow, a high-level framework to hide the implementation details of Hadoop and to provide a set of building blocks to create biomedical pipelines in a more intuitive way. We demonstrate the benefit of Cloudflow on three different genetic use cases. It will be shown how the framework can be combined with the Hadoop workflow system Cloudgene and the cloud orchestration platform CloudMan to provide Hadoop pipelines as a service to everyone. The framework is open source and free available at https://github.com/genepi/cloudflow.