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GUIdock-VNC: Using a graphical desktop sharing system to provide a browser-based interface for containerized software

2017; University of Oxford; Volume: 6; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/gigascience/giw013

2047-217X

Varun Mittal, Ling‐Hong Hung, Jayant Keswani, Daniel Kristiyanto, Sung Bong Lee, Ka Yee Yeung,

Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies

Software container technology such as Docker can be used to package and distribute bioinformatics workflows consisting of multiple software implementations and dependencies. However, Docker is a command line-based tool, and many bioinformatics pipelines consist of components that require a graphical user interface.We present a container tool called GUIdock-VNC that uses a graphical desktop sharing system to provide a browser-based interface for containerized software. GUIdock-VNC uses the Virtual Network Computing protocol to render the graphics within most commonly used browsers. We also present a minimal image builder that can add our proposed graphical desktop sharing system to any Docker packages, with the end result that any Docker packages can be run using a graphical desktop within a browser. In addition, GUIdock-VNC uses the Oauth2 authentication protocols when deployed on the cloud.As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrated the utility of GUIdock-noVNC in gene network inference. We benchmarked our container implementation on various operating systems and showed that our solution creates minimal overhead.