Taverna has now moved to the Apache Software Foundation. For updated information, see Apache Taverna (incubating).

Taverna 2.4 (and below) requirements

Operating system

Taverna Workbench 2.4 has been successfully tested on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X (10.4 and higher) and various versions of Linux.

Memory

In order to run Taverna, it is a good idea for your machine to have at least 1GB of RAM. Taverna will run with less memory than that, but its performance may be affected.

For OS X and Linux, Taverna will use a maximum of 400 MB. On Windows, “taverna-debug.bat” will also use 400 MB, while “taverna.exe” will use up to 400 MB or, if higher, 50% of available memory at the point of launching Taverna.

If Taverna happens to run out of memory while running a workflow with large data (or large number of data), you can set Taverna to store data in a database by going to Preferences->Data and Provenance and removing the tick for “In-memory storage”. This will reduce execution speed slightly, but should consume less memory. Also remember to remove any old runs you are no longer interested in.

http://www.mygrid.org.uk/dev/wiki/display/taverna/Data+and+provenance+preferences has more details on the data settings in Taverna.

If you need to increase the available memory, edit “taverna.sh” or “taverna-debug.bat” and replace “-Xmx400m” with say “-Xmx600m” to use 600 MiB.

For OS X you would need to right click on “Taverna.app” and go inside the application bundle to edit Contents/Info.plist and change the same parameter using the Property List Editor.

http://www.mygrid.org.uk/dev/wiki/display/taverna/Increase+memory+allocation has more details on memory allocation.

Java

Taverna requires the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 6 or later from Oracle. No other versions of Java are officially tested with Taverna.

Windows users might need to download Java – but in most cases the Taverna installer would already have checked if Java is installed on the system.

Linux users have different options to install Java depending on their Linux distribution. Some distributions, such as Ubuntu, might come with alternative open source implementations of Java, like Gnu GCJ and OpenJDK. We have identified some issues with these implementations, and recommend using the official Java implementation from Sun/Oracle.

To check which version of Java you are using, start a terminal and run:

java –version

It is strongly recommended that you install the Java Crytography Extension for your version of Java.

  • Download unlimited cryptography policy for Java 6
  • Download unlimited cryptography policy for Java 7

 

GraphViz

The external tool Graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org/) is used for generating workflow diagrams in Taverna. A version of Graphviz is bundled in the Windows install, while Linux and Mac OS X users will need to install Graphviz separately.

As of Taverna 2.3.0, GraphViz is no longer bundled with Taverna for MAC OS X due to an issue with 32 and 64-bit versions of GraphViz so you would need to install the correct one for your system yourself.

For OS X, please install Version 2.26.3 of GraphViz. Later versions of GraphViz may not work correctly.

Some users have reported problems with dot on certain Windows machines. This problem is because dot relies on the MSCV90.dll library to work. If your machine does not already have this library, then it can be installed using the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) from Microsoft.

For Linux, most distributions have a way to install Graphviz. For Ubuntu, try:

sudo apt-get install graphviz

For other distributions, see http://www.graphviz.org/Download.php for instructions. Please note that you do not need the Grappa Java library.

In most cases Taverna should be able to pick up the location of the Graphviz binary dot from the PATH after you have installed it. If this is not the case, see http://www.mygrid.org.uk/dev/wiki/display/taverna/Workbench+preferences on how to configure the location of dot executable in Taverna Workbench.

libgnome

For most versions of Linux it is necessary to install the libgnome-2.0 package or equivalent. This allows Taverna to open pages in your preferred web browser.

If you want to use the Interaction plugin then it is essential that libgnome, or equivalent, is installed.