Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 2.17
Taverna workflow for generic protein analysis.
From the MyExperiment Web site ( http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows/124/versions/1/previews/full )
by M.B. Monteiro.
( Armbrust et al. , 2010 ). In practical terms, the maturing of Cloud computing, a long-
held dream of the IT community, means that the analysis of large datasets is no lon-
ger constrained by the availability of compute resources at either the personal or
institutional level. Several of the major online companies offer very affordable
and reasonably readily learnt access to thousands of CPUs from any web-enabled
desktop computer. Computational problems that would otherwise take thousands
of hours to process using current computer technology can be farmed out to the
Cloud, and completed in an hour or two using several thousand CPUs.
For example, the online seller Amazon offers access to Cloud facilities via the
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). 17 A user can set up an account
using a credit card, log in and access not only computers, but also a range of different
software and hardware setups (known as instances ). At the time of writing, a default
on-demand instance was priced at $US0.115 per hour. Similarly, Google offers
17 http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ .
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