Google cloud takes on cancer research with help from its friends
September 8, 2015
Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.
Google has been energetically pushing its cloud as a viable alternative to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure when it comes to big, burly computing jobs. As part of that effort, on Tuesday it made previously announced “preemptible virtual machines” available to customers and said that the Broad Institute will be able to use these computing instances, along with software services from Cycle Computing, to perform complex cancer research.
Pre-emptible VMs is tech talk for deeply discounted (70% off!) cloud computing processors which can be applied to big research projects or other tasks as needed. Amazon AMZN 3.35% has long offered “spot instances” that customers can bid on in an auction-like format…
The Broad Institute’s Cancer Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts has data sets on cancer cell lines, “gene expression data,” and information about how various molecules interact with that gene expression. Gene expression data provides clues as to how often a given gene in a creature’s DNA is actually used by a cell…
Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2015/09/08/google-cloud-cancer-research/