MG-RAST Version 4 �\ Lessons learned from a decade of low-budget ultra-high throughput metagenome analysis

Folker Meyer, Saurabh Bagchi, Somali Chaterji, Wolfgang Gerlach, Ananth Grama, Travis Harrison, Tobias Paczian, Will Trimble, Andreas Wilke

MG-RAST is an open-source platform for the efficient analysis of environmental sequence data.
The system consists of three major components: an analytics workflow, an API, and a data
warehouse. As a widely-used community portal dedicated to metagenomic analysis, it operates
at a significant scale and has the ability to optimize for computational efficiency that individual
groups do not possess. The portal makes available to researchers data and analyses from a
well-defined and trusted workflow. Using containerization and workflows, the system provides 
transparency and the ability to scale out almost arbitrarily. Moreover, a RESTful API is 
available to facilitate reuse of data and results.