Architecture and Setup

This document describes the MCAST web server, and provides instructions for setting up your own web server.

Web server architecture

Flowchart of MCAST Server

The figure above illustrates the flow design of the MCAST server. Grey boxes indicate web pages that the user sees.

The site is run via the following three CGI scripts:

These scripts are stored in the cgi-bin directory.

The three primary CGI scripts use a shared code library, stored in cgi-bin/SERVER. In the source, a code library named Foo would be accessed by doing use SERVER::Foo. The libraries are as follows:

Note that the Queue and Process libraries work closely together.

Most of the web server code, as well as the description above, were written by Paul Pavlidis for the Gist SVM web server.

Setting up your own web server

Following are the steps you should follow in order to set up your own web server. These instructions assume you are working in a Unix environment.

  1. Download and install Meta-MEME from the web site. For more information, read the installation instructions.
  2. After compiling Meta-MEME, change into the directory web/mcast/bin and type make all. This will create soft links from the web/mcast/bin directory to the programs that are required by the MCAST server. Note that if you run make all on a different machine than your web server, you may need to edit the ARCH variable in web/mcast/bin/makefile.
  3. Edit the file web/mcast/cgi-bin/SERVER/Globals.pm so that the variables listed at the top of that file are correct for your system.
  4. Configure your web server...

The MCAST software was developed by Timothy Bailey at the Advanced Computational Modelling Centre at the University of Queensland and William Stafford Noble in the Department of Genome Sciences and Computer Science at the University of Washington. Computational resources are provided by the National Biomedical Computation Research at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. NBCR is funded by the National Center for Research Resources (P41 RR08605-07).