Translational Bioinformatics in the cloud: an affordable alternative.
With the continued exponential expansion of publicly available genomic data and access to low-cost, high-throughput molecular technologies for profiling patient populations, computational technologies and informatics are becoming vital considerations in genomic medicine. Although cloud computing technology is being heralded as a key enabling technology for the future of genomic research, available case studies are limited to applications in the domain of high-throughput sequence data analysis. The goal of this study was to evaluate the computational and economic characteristics of cloud computing in performing a large-scale data integration and analysis representative of research problems in genomic medicine. We find that the cloud-based analysis compares favorably in both performance and cost in comparison to a local computational cluster, suggesting that cloud computing technologies might be a viable resource for facilitating large-scale translational research in genomic medicine.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20691073
Dudley JT, Pouliot Y, Chen R, Morgan AA, Butte AJ. Translational Bioinformatics in the cloud: an affordable alternative. Genome Med.2010 Aug 6;2(8):51.