title: Phylogenetic code in the cloud - can it meet the expectations?
abstract: Cloud computing has recently become very popular, and several bioinformatics applications exist already in that domain. The aim of this article is to analyse a current cloud system with respect to usability, benchmark its performance and compare its user friendliness with a conventional cluster job submission system. Given the current hype on the theme, user expectations are rather high, but current results show that neither the price/performance ratio nor the usage model is very satisfactory for large-scale embarrassingly parallel applications. However, for small to medium scale applications that require CPU time at certain peak times the cloud is a suitable alternative.
authors.affiliation: BioTeam Inc., Middleton, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kraut
authors.forename: Sébastien
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Moretti
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Robinson-Rechavi
authors.forename: Heinz
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Stockinger
authors.forename: Dean
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Flanders
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D003205:Computing Methodologies; D008491:Medical Informatics Applications; D010802:Phylogeny; D012985:Software Design