Google Cloud Does Genomics: A Copybook Cloud Use Case
July 3, 2015
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.
Genomics is perhaps the perfect use case for the public cloud. Genomics workloads tend to have massive, yet irregular, processing needs. Researchers often need to run massive analytics workloads in order to crunch genomics data. Often, however, those workloads are needed for finite periods of time. In the old days, powering these workloads required investment in supercomputing resources – massively expensive hardware that might only be used for a short period of time.
With the advent of the public cloud, however, researchers can spin up almost unlimited amounts of computing power, but only use that power as and when they need it. It is hard to overstate just how revolutionary this is and the cloud has meant much research that wouldn’t have been viable previously, can now be performed…
That got even easier with the recent announcement that Google’s Cloud Platform is integrating with the Broad Institute’s Genome Analysis Toolkit. What that means is that researchers will be able to use the Institute’s Genome Analysis Toolkit as a plugin service running on top of the Google Cloud Platform – the toolkit (handily referred to as GATK) will leverage Google’s cloud resources…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/07/03/google-cloud-does-genomics-a-copybook-cloud-use-case/