Hoosiers tap cloud for sequencing

Some 400 miles west of the IBM-powered Pitt, Indiana University is spending $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health on its own high-end computing discovery tools. The Hoosiers' Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center is targeting cloud computing to support life science research.

In addition to busting computing bottlenecks, the center plans to use the cloud for analyzing sequencing data, the volume of which is "one to two orders of magnitude larger than possible with current computational capabilities," according to an industry article. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other open source software are expected to be part of the installation.

The center's research team will partner with IU life science research teams to test the platform in such research areas as sequence assembly and population genomics. Cloud technologies will also be applied to gene family clustering and structural visualization.

The IU work is also supported by the National Science Foundation via its FutureGrid experimental supercomputing network project.

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