title: Translational bioinformatics in the cloud: an affordable alternative.
abstract: With the continued exponential expansion of publicly available genomic data and access to low-cost, high-throughput molecular technologies for profiling patient populations, computational technologies and informatics are becoming vital considerations in genomic medicine. Although cloud computing technology is being heralded as a key enabling technology for the future of genomic research, available case studies are limited to applications in the domain of high-throughput sequence data analysis. The goal of this study was to evaluate the computational and economic characteristics of cloud computing in performing a large-scale data integration and analysis representative of research problems in genomic medicine. We find that the cloud-based analysis compares favorably in both performance and cost in comparison to a local computational cluster, suggesting that cloud computing technologies might be a viable resource for facilitating large-scale translational research in genomic medicine.
authors.affiliation: Program in Biomedical Informatics, Stanford University School of Medicine, 251 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. jdudley@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Joel T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Dudley
authors.forename: Yannick
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Pouliot
authors.forename: Rong
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Alexander A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Morgan
authors.forename: Atul J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Butte