Data-Intensive Science Workshops, to be held Sept. 19 to 20, 2010, Seattle, WA; and Mar 20 to 21, 2011, Washington DC

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The Seattle Children's Hospital is awarded a grant to conduct two workshops that will address the opportunities offered by cloud computing to confront the task of uncovering scientific knowledge from enormous amounts of data generated by biological research. The workshop goals are responsive to the NSF strategic vision on Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering, which challenges the community to develop and sustain the necessary cyberinfrastructure capable of enabling science and engineering in the 21st century. Cloud computing offers an unprecedented opportunity to address the challenges of this data bottleneck and open up a new era in Data-Intensive Science (DIS). The two workshops will bring practitioners in biological informatics together to discuss challenges, opportunities and strategies in order to propose short- and long-term strategies to take on these challenges. There is a significant and very timely potential for widespread applicability in that there are many disciplines that now routinely generate data sets that overwhelm storage and analysis infrastructures. The workshops will showcase not only the communities and their challenges, but, more importantly, address how best to meet those challenges. The workshops will connect computational, data analysis, and inter-disciplinary research communities, including researchers, analyzers, developers, educators, community and tribal leaders, scientific administrators, and policymakers. This will enable both high-level (strategic) and specific (operational) discussions and developments of the user requirements, user-based evaluations, and standardized development with broad impact beyond the particular community challenges. Cloud computing can have a major impact at helping four main types of diversity issues and institutions. First, clouds have the potential to allow access to extensive compute resources to research groups from all sizes of institutes, but particularly the small to mid-sized institutes that cannot afford to increase their local compute infrastructure. Similarly, secondly, minority-serving institutes (e.g. Howard University) and, thirdly, gender-serving institutions (e.g. Wellesley College) can take advantage of a common resource to boost their compute capabilities. Fourth, young investigators can have ready access to resources outside of their current support levels while more senior investigators can adapt to the increased need for compute resources in their field. These workshops will be held in September 19-20, 2010 (Seattle, WA; Seattle Children's Research Institute) and March 20-21, 2011 (Washington, D.C.; J. Craig Venter Institute). Further information on the workshops and their outcomes will be available via the PI's lab home page at http://kolkerlab.proteinspire.org/.