Last week, GenomeQuest held our "The Next Generation of Sequence Analysis" seminar for Harvard-based Researchers. It was sponsored by Bob Steen, manager of the Harvard Biopolymers Facility. According to Bob, it was the 2nd largest crowd ever for his seminars and the largest ever for a software topic -- an indicator that reseachers ...
Lincoln Stein lays out "The case for cloud computing in genome informatics" pretty nicely. The article describes the inflection point of sequencing technology. That is from 1990 to 2004 'base-pair/$' doubled every 19 months versus a doubling every 5 months since 2004 to present. There is no end in sight. Moving data to the ...
The most thoughtful folks in the health care industry acknowledge that the future will be defined by molecular (aka personalized) medicine. Without being infinitely tedious, it will be a matter of measuring your body's instructions (DNA) and your present state (RNA/proteins) and prescribing a course of treatment with the most likely positive outcome and ...
Earlier I blogged on the distinctions between Infrastructure, Platform, and Software-as-a-Service offerings. The message was that "cloud" is an overloaded word and takes many forms and has different customer value propositions. A recent commentary in GenomeWeb "Considering a Cloud? Cost isn't everything..." citing the paper "The Real Cost of a CPU Hour" ...
Today, we launched our API’s for Sequence Data Management on the cloud. So what? GenomeQuest is now for bioinformatics and computational biologists (we call them developers for short). These are people who prefer to write code in Unix, and prefer awk, perl, and sed to Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Chrome. So why is that important? With no ...
Executives in the industry sometimes ask me if we are moving our software to the “cloud”. When I say we are already a cloud, then they wonder: “then what is Amazon offering?” Its helpful to think of the cloud as a layered architecture. The VC Bessemer provides a nice definition of this layering. Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Web-services ...
If you are a developer or a technical type, this one is for you. Over at Depth-First there is a blog post about an application in the cheminformatics field: PubCouch: Streams aren't just for Pipeline Pilot. The author illustrates how a well abstracted Web service avoids the costly database Extract-Transform-Load operations so familiar ...
A plot of the Evolution of Computer Capacity and Costs shows that compute power will be 1,000X cheaper in 10 years. How much lower can it go? As this happens the relative cost of managing another computer goes asymptotic to zero, regardless of whether its hosted internally or externally. I don't think there is ...
At the CHI NGS conference, I chaired a roundtable of key managers and influencers discussing the opportunity and challenges to adoption of "cloud computing" for NGS applications. As a first observation, the session was well attended and people are thinking deeply about cloud issues. About 16 participated including representatives from major pharmaceuticals, agroscience, major ...
I was recently interviewed for an article by Kevin Davies at Bio-IT World on our GenomeQuest 6.0Beta launch. He immediately connected our story to "NGS" and "Cloud" computing. We have deliberately not over-played the "cloud" aspect of our offering, but as the response from the article shows, there is a lot of interest in the ...
