Bioinformatics and the cloud

Bioinformatics is a discipline combining computing and biology. The aim is to decipher life at all levels from genomes through to simulations of life.

Bioinformatics faces two major challenges. Firstly our data volumes are an order of magnitude behind high energy physics. The demand for data processing continues to increase whilst the cost of data production falls. Secondly our audience is world wide and we must ensure geography does not impede scientific discovery. 

Here we present 3 case studies. One from the Ensembl Genome Browser (http://www.ensembl.org) using clouds to provide geolocated websites. The second is from Helix Nebula (http://helix-nebula.eu/). Here we are using the cloud to augment our data processing capabilities and to bring this to the masses. Our final case study is EMBL-EBI (http://www.ebi.ac.uk) providing its own Infrastructure as a Service cloud to geolocate geographically disparate users with the institute's data. 

Finally we will also present recently published work on using DNA as a viable 1000 year archive of data.

Andy Yates

Andrew Yates is a Project Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI); near Cambridge, England. He has worked in bioinformatics for 10 years and currently runs the core software team for the Ensembl project (http://www.ensembl.org) responsible for the continued evolution of Ensembl’s databases and APIs as well as the development of Ensembl’s core infrastructure. Ensembl is one of the primary methods biological scientific researchers access human genome data in a free and open source environment. Preceding this project Andy was a founder member of Ensembl Genomes project (http://www.ensemblgenomes.org) extending Ensembl’s infrastructure to a wider taxonomic scope of species. Andy was educated at the University of Manchester gaining an MSc in Bioinfomatics before joining the Cancer Genome Project at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, England. He continues to be involved the open source BioJava project.