Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
resources, again meaning you only pay for the cycles you use, not for a
supercomputer that sits idle for 80% of the year. The cloud also sits
outside a corporation's data centres, which is excellent for supporting
collaboration with third parties, and prevents corporate fi re walls having
holes punched through them to allow third-party access. It is also
expected that the sheer scale of cloud operations should offer considerable
cost-savings over replicating the same functionality in a private data
centre. In fact, open source software lends itself very nicely to cloud
deployment. First, there are no licencing issues about running the software
on hardware that is outside of an organisation, and, second, there are no
restrictions about the number of CPUs that can accommodate the
workload (other than justifying the actual running costs of course). In
contrast, there are often restrictions placed on such things with
commercial software depending on individual business models.
There are, however, also risks in using open source software especially
as part of a commercial process. For open source software to be a
key part of such a process the following questions would need to be
addressed.
1. Is the software written in a way that prevents malicious use, in a
nutshell is it secure and hack-resistant?
2. How would a scientist get support? As part of a key platform support
has to be more than posting a question on a wiki and hoping someone
responds in a reasonable time with the right answer. Also in a modern
global pharmaceutical company these scientists could be in any time
zone.
3. How would users get training? Again this is expected to be more
than a FAQ sheet, and depending on the software could range from
instructor-led classes, through to interactive online training.
4. How would the system receive updates and upgrades? How quickly
would this follow release? How would it be tested? What are the
change control mechanisms?
5. Are there any restrictions or incompatibilities with the various open
source licences, and the use of other software and services that may
restrict how things like extra security (e.g. user authentication) can
be wrapped round an open source package?
It was with these questions in mind that the Pistoia Sequence Services
Project was launched. The ultimate aim was to host DNA sequence
software in the cloud, learning what works and addressing some of the
questions above. Indeed, two of the above questions were quickly
Search WWH ::
Custom Search