Collaborative Research: G-SESAME Cloud: A Dynamically Scalable Collaboration Community for Biological Knowledge Discovery

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Clemson University and the University of Illinois at Chicago are awarded grants to develop a dynamically scalable collaboration community, G-SESAME Cloud, for biological knowledge discovery. The first aim of this project is to enhance the popular G-SESAME (Gene Semantic Similarity Analysis and Measurement) tools (http://bioinformatics.clemson.edu/G-SESAME) in terms of methodology, functionality, accuracy, efficiency, and scalability to address the immediate needs of researchers who utilize G-SESAME tools in their daily biological research. The ultimate goal is to build a community-based scalable cloud computing infrastructure (G-SESAME Cloud) to help the biological researchers disseminate their research results. This infrastructure will provide a set of Web-based tools for biological researchers to automatically (or semi-automatically) convert their GO-based biological programs developed in any programming languages under any platforms into Web services and publish them on the G-SESAME Cloud. Researchers can also use a configuration utility developed in this project to easily configure their computing facilities into the G-SESAME Cloud.This project will produce a complete set of Web services for measuring the functional similarity of biological entities using different methods, and for discovering biological knowledge based on such similarity values. The G-SESAME Cloud will provide a community-based, effective and self-scalable cloud computing environment in which researchers can easily publish their biological application software as a service (SaaS) and share their computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS).The G-SESAME Cloud and its GO-based Web services will release the burden of biological researchers from learning Web technologies and maintaining their own computing facilities so that they can focus on their research. The success of this project will set an example for building self-scalable community-based biological Cloud to promote resource sharing and SaaS, IaaS and PaaS (Platform as a Service) concepts in biological research community. This project will also be used to train Computer Science students, including women and minority students, on distributed computing, data mining, and Web technologies.