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Running a business in the cloud – one year on
May 21st, 2013 by Glenn Proctor
This time last year I wrote a blog post entitled "Running a business in the cloud" describing how we at Eagle use various cloud services in the day-to-day running of our business. At the time that post was written, we hadn't been using the various services for long, so I thought that now would be…
GlusterFS vs a future Distributed Bioinformatics File System
March 28th, 2013 by Mutlu Dogruel
What is GlusterFS? The main theme of this year’s Eagle symposium was Big Data and its implications on Bioinformatics budgets. We have been witnessing a dramatic departure from conventional back-end storage practices recently with the rise of technologies such as Amazon S3 and Hadoop. Hadoop coerces us to think in terms of the “divide and conquer”…
Crowdsourcing pros and cons
February 28th, 2013 by Richard Holland
I wanted to blog about this paper on crowdsourcing in bioinformatics but had great difficulty in finding any way of getting across the message without simply cutting-and-pasting the entire paper verbatim. Readers with an interest in the field would do well to read the entire original, but here I'll try to summarise it in a…
Fibre optics 1, FedEx 0
February 11th, 2013 by Richard Holland
Moving data around is probably the single biggest headache for modern bioinformaticians. You might have a super duper compute facility in your local university data centre, or the ability to tap into Amazon or other cloud services on demand, but unless you can get your data there and your results back quickly there's very little…
ENCODE: A beachcomber’s guide to the genome
September 11th, 2012 by Will Spooner
ENCODE press coverage focused on their ‘de-junking’ of the genome. But semantic wrangling apart, what will the ENCODE legacy be?
Storage at a glacial pace
August 30th, 2012 by Richard Holland
Amazon's announcement of its new Glacier storage service last week was a great example of a company listening to the needs of its customers then acting accordingly. I should have blogged about it already, but was waiting to read up on the details a bit first to see if it could actually be applicable to…
More Big Data
August 1st, 2012 by Richard Holland
After last week's post on Big Data, here's another one, this time drawing inspiration from a completely different industry – Defence and Intelligence! Thayne Coffman, CSO at 21CT, gave a presentation at FloCon 2012 in Texas on lessons learned from network analysis R&D in defence and intel. His executive summary raised three main points: 1. Analysts…
Big Data Sharing
July 24th, 2012 by Richard Holland
BioTeam's Ari Berman wrote a guest blog over at Bio-IT World this month on the subject of sharing big data. Ari describes a transition over time from papers that themselves represented the complete set of data that needed to be shared, to the current trend for papers that present only the briefest summary and require…
A comparison of traditional vs. cloud HPC
July 10th, 2012 by Will Spooner
Strait of Magellan Oil Platforms. SpecMode CC BY-SA-3.0 One area where the cloud is receiving a lot of attention is in High Performance Compute (HPC). From a sheer number of cores perspective, the scalability of some platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), has been proven. See Cycle Computing's 50,000 node virtual supercomputer for example. But HPC is…
Apache projects around Hadoop in a nutshell
June 28th, 2012 by Mutlu Dogruel
You might be a little surprised to know that Apache Software Foundation hosts over 100 top-level software projects, but you will certainly be surprised to know that there are at least a dozen Hadoop related Apache projects, if you haven’t come across them yet. Today I will mention briefly about 4 projects in the Hadoop…