Informatics
Latest weather forecast: more clouds on the horizon...
Cloud collaboration has allowed projects of previously unimaginable scale and scope to be constructed at an unmet price/performance ratio. Widespread access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and agile and adaptable systems of workflow now allow people across the globe to collaborate on virtual mega-engineering projects that are unprecedented in scale or scope1.
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dopting new computer and infrastructure technologies in the drug discovery and development community only makes sense if it results in better and faster scientific research. IT buzz words are often overwhelming scientists without translating these great technolo- gy innovations into viable scientific solutions. Life Sciences research is becoming increasingly collabo- rative and complex, leveraging multiple technolo- gies to get a systems level understanding of diseases and organisms. This exponential increase in the scale of data being generated combined with increased collaboration has resulted in a need to rethink how data is cost effectively stored, analysed and shared among teams. Cloud comput- ing is a combination of technologies and service offerings and has the potential to increase the speed of basic research projects significantly. Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company, predicts that the worldwide market for cloud services will grow from $58.6 bil- lion in 2009 to $148.8 billion by 2014. What are the benefits, negatives and opportuni- ties of the use of cloud computing? The majority of publications about cloud computing in pharma- ceutical discovery are product or technology cen- tric. Would it not be more appropriate to start with the end user in mind and look at the application from a user-centric perspective?
Drug Discovery World Fall 2011 Democratising research
The cloud as an infrastructure gives researchers computational access on a subscription or pay-by- demand cost structure. Instant access to computa- tional power, significantly lower administration costs, no capital spending headaches and no dependence of availability of IT resources. Software as a service (SaaS) is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally in the cloud and are typically accessed by users using a thin client computer or tablet device, using a web browser over the Internet. Zero footprint applications imply that no software needs to be pre-installed on your client. This significantly helps to simplify installation pro- cedures. A browser is all you need! To upload suc- cessfully large datasets, it is critical to have access to fast network infrastructures. Limited network bandwidth, especially in start-up phase, may result in frustration and should be avoided. As a researcher you want to avoid thinking in computer terms. Table 1 summarises the overall nomenclature and major acronyms for the most common cloud computing service models: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.
Basic research in most academic disciplines is undergoing a fundamental shift from the three tra- ditional paradigms of theory, experiment and com- putation to a new fourth paradigm of data-driven
85 By Peter Boogaard
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