Bioinformatics Research as a Service

Well these days everything is becoming a service in the cloud! It is amazing of what kind of options and scenarios become possible if you connect them to the “infinite” computational power and broadband internet access… One of these interesting field is also Bioinformatics Computation in the Cloud (or maybe we could call like something like BRaaS, to make people confused a bit further ).

Anyway, I have recently checked out Steve’s blog and saw an interesting article on the Microsoft Biology Initiative and Microsoft Biology Foundation (a .NET open-source library of reusable bioinformatics algorithms and functions) that is a joint collaboration of the Microsoft External Research and eXtreme Computing Groups.

As you can imagine (and I imagine, since I am not working in these fields) these problems need a lot of computation power, since talking about Genomics immediately brings to mind at least enormous quantities of data (if not other more scary connotations ). Nevertheless the interesting part of the initiative is the Excel 2010 Plug-in that uses a AzureBLAST (as it looks BLAST is a very popular life sciences algorithm used commonly in bioinformatics research) engine running in Windows Azure (GO Cloud GO!) to process massive sets of data…

Amazing, interesting, go check it out! It is a definite eye-opener for the potential of “the Cloud” (and Windows Azure of course)!

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure Platform,Bioinformatics Research,Cloud Computing