SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond

Biology on the Cloud
The Cloud provides a wide range of infrastructure and software services that can be used
by the Biology user community. Indeed, experienced technical computing users are already
finding ways in which to use these services to augment their existing computing resources.
The greater promise of the cloud is that it can make technical computing pervasive,
opening up the field to new researchers who have not been traditional HPC users. These
researchers will be able to co-opt sophisticated cloud services provided by both academia
and commercial providers to aid them in their research. In this paper I will showcase two
Biology Cloud use cases which offer a number of advantages to users.
IaaS: Web-services Mirrors
The Ensembl project provides a variety of web services which allows researchers to visualise
and data-mine genomic data (www.ensembl.org). Ensembl has a world-wide audience and is
accessed 24 hours a day. Historically, the web service was hosted in a single UK datacentre.
Whilst this provided fast access to users in the UK and Europe, users in Asia and the
Americas found that access to the web services was slow, due the large latencies involved
in serving requests across the globe. Single site hosting also made the website vulnerable
to datacentre and network outages.
The global, distributed nature of commercial Cloud IaaS make them a useful building block
for providing world-wide availability and reach. Ensembl has used public IaaS providers to
build mirrors of its web services in the United States of America and Asia. Not only has this
massively increased the performance of the website for non <strong>European</strong> users, but it also
provides continued availability of service when the UK datacentre is offline.
Cloud hosting provides several advantages over hosting in a traditional co-location facility.
Installing real hardware in a remote co-location facility requires time-consuming and costly
logistics. Hardware has to be shipped to the facility and cleared through customs, and
staff need to be present on site to oversee hardware installation and initial provisioning.
In contrast, provisioning virtual hardware in a remote cloud IaaS facility can be done from
any location with internet access, whilst the “on-demand” facilities allow machines to be
provisioned within a matter of minutes
CloudScape III - Taking <strong>European</strong> Cloud Infrastructure Forward
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SaaS: Providing Informatics services for Next-Generation
Sequencing (NGS)
SasS provides new opportunities for organisations to provide IT services to researchers.
IT service provision for next-generation sequencing machines is a huge challenge. A single
sequencing instrument can produce approximately a terabyte of raw data per day and a
large sequencing study may end up with a total dataset of many hundreds of terabytes.
Dealing with this data is a challenge for organisations of all sizes, whether they are a small
lab with a single machine, or a large sequencing centre with many tens of machines.