Bioinformatics Science is now facing a deluge of data that is changing drastically the customs of the community. Most common analyses have evolved to a larger scale, for example from the study of a single gene/protein to a whole genome/proteome, from a single metabolic pathway to Systems Biology.
Now, Bioinformatics is requiring research infrastructures able to store very large biological data sets, complex and heterogeneous, and to make these data avalaible for intensive scientific computing. Facing to this growing needs, we should take advantage of the new developments in distributed and intensive computing with high-throughput infrastructure like supercomputers of large clusters, computing and data grids, and also the specific intensive-computing hardwares like GPU, FPGA or Cell processor.
From the Bioinformatics point of view, the challenge is now to succeed the integration of our usual biological data and tools, to develop the next-generation tools according to these new information infrastructures, and to propose to the users - biologists and bioinformaticians - efficient interfaces and gateways to these infrastructures.
To give you an insight into these new developments, you can have a look at projects like:
- Web Services - Provide scientists and developers with programmatic access to bioinformatics Web services (gbio.ibcp.fr/ws)
- GRISBI - Grid Support for the Bioinformatics (www.grisbio.fr)
- EMBRACE Network of Excellence, A European Model for Bioinformatics Research and Community Education (www.embracegrid.info)
- HIPCAL cloud computing and Life Science applications (hipcal.lri.fr)
- EGEE - Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (www.eu-egee.org)
- StratusLab - The StratusLab initiative was started in November 2008 to explore the integration of cloud technologies and services, especially virtualisation, into existing Grid Infrastructures (www.stratuslab.org)
