This week, I attended the Consumer Genomics Show (more so a “clinical genomics" show). In a session on Next Generation Sequencing led by five industry experts, a recurring observation was that, on the one hand, steady investments in sequencing technology was indeed delivering breathtaking value and driving down sequencing costs – bravo indeed and ...
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 ...
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" ...
An article by Nicholas Wade, science writer for the New York Times Disease Cause Is Pinpointed With Genome describes two research teams who have independently sequenced the entire genome of patients to find the exact genetic cause of their diseases. A fantastic research blog post at Genetic Future titled Disease hunting ...
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 ...
Ryan McBride from Xconomy posted this nice article on GQ yesterday. After our discussion, he asked me if the "Google of Genomics" metaphor applied and I did not deny, thus the title: "GenomeQuest Wants to Be the Google of DNA Data Searches"
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 ...
Variant reports are not the right deliverable for a re-sequencing study. A well written technical blog 'MassGenomics' written by Dan Koboldt illustrates why. Dan says "What’s more, with the advent of next-generation sequencing, I hate to tell you, but people are going to be reporting a lot of false positives. I guarantee it. So when ...
Our concept “Sequence Data Management” (SDM) doesn’t fit the primary/secondary/tertiary analysis informatics categories. Why? Because we've coupled the alignment step with the analysis step in one-shot. Why is that better? Biologists can to compute the data on their own and mine the data in an easy to use web application. They are able to “finish ...
