Supporting data for "GUIdock-VNC: Using a graphical desktop sharing system to provide a browser-based interface for containerized software"
Dataset type: Software
Data released on December 20, 2016
Mittal V; Hung L; Keswani J; Kristiyanto D; Lee SB; Yeung KY (2016): Supporting data for "GUIdock-VNC: Using a graphical desktop sharing system to provide a browser-based interface for containerized software" GigaScience Database. http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100261
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.
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