title: Low cost, high performance processing of single particle cryo-electron microscopy data in the cloud.
abstract: The advent of a new generation of electron microscopes and direct electron detectors has realized the potential of single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a technique to generate high-resolution structures. Calculating these structures requires high performance computing clusters, a resource that may be limiting to many likely cryo-EM users. To address this limitation and facilitate the spread of cryo-EM, we developed a publicly available 'off-the-shelf' computing environment on Amazon's elastic cloud computing infrastructure. This environment provides users with single particle cryo-EM software packages and the ability to create computing clusters with 16-480+ CPUs. We tested our computing environment using a publicly available 80S yeast ribosome dataset and estimate that laboratories could determine high-resolution cryo-EM structures for $50 to $1500 per structure within a timeframe comparable to local clusters. Our analysis shows that Amazon's cloud computing environment may offer a viable computing environment for cryo-EM.
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States.
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Cianfrocco
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States.
authors.forename: Andres E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Leschziner
mesh_terms: D020285:Cryoelectron Microscopy / Q000379:methods*; D030541:Databases, Genetic / Q000191:economics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005810:Multigene Family; D012270:Ribosomes / Q000235:genetics* / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D012984:Software / Q000191:economics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015003:Yeasts
keywords: Amazon EC2; S. cerevisiae; biophysics; cloud computing; cryo-EM; image analysis; single-particle analysis; structural biology