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 or several genomes at the same time. And such scientific needs imply to have efficient and scalable technologies to handle and analyze these biological data, what we could call "greedy" Bioinformatics.
Since 2001, I am spending a part of my time to study distributed computing topics and their application to Biology and Bioinformatics. That is done through the participation to several projects (some of them closed now) such as GriPPS, e-Toile, Datagrid, EMBRACE, EGEE, HIPCAL and GRISBI. For more details, please have a look at the gBIO - grid Bioinformatics - page [ http://gbio-pbil.ibcp.fr ].
Such computing technologies that could be very usefull to build a Research Infrastructure for Bioinformatics are of course grid computing, and now cloud computing that is showing very promising functionalities. But yet none of them are completely mature and providing answers to all the requirement of Bioinformatics.
Since 2007, I am chairing the GRISBI - Grid Support to Bioinformatics - transversal project of the French Bioinformatics network RENABI. Which main goal is to set up a distributed computing infrastructure at the national level, by bringing together existing resources from the bioinformatics center. This infrastructure will make easier the distribution and usage of biological data across the research sites and then make possible challenging bioinformatics applications dealing with large scale biological systems [www.grisbio.fr ].
The other important part of my work is devoted to the responsibility of the IBCP computing infrastructure (systems and network administration, security of Information system, Web mail DNS servers and so on). I am member of the "Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS), working at the "Institut de Biologie et Chimie des Protéines" (IBCP) in Lyon. And I am also giving lectures about Bioinformatics and distributed computing to postgraduate students.
Contact
Christophe BLANCHET - CNRS IBCP, 7 passage du Vercors, 69007 LYON, FRANCE
christophe.blanchet -at- ibcp.fr
