CiC (RDDC): Commoditizing Data-Intensive Biocomputing in the Cloud

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In the life sciences, today?s DNA sequencers can generate a terabyte (or 1 trillion bytes) of data in a minute. As a consequence, the size of DNA sequence databases is growing faster than they can be computed upon with a personal computer. Thus, scientists and engineers must increasingly rely on the parallelism of high-performance computing (HPC) to keep pace. Unfortunately, not only are such HPC resources costly to own and maintain, but they are also difficult to access and use. The MetaRx software environment addresses the above issues by transforming and commoditizing cloud computing infrastructures, such as Microsoft Azure, to massively accelerate the discovery process for scientists and engineers. This transformation and commoditization of cloud computing provides scientists with the capability of provisioning large amounts of computational and storage resources via an easy-to-use interface to the cloud, including the capability of ?teleporting? data via a ?WonkaVision for scientific data? metaphor. With computing widely recognized as the third pillar of science, complementing the traditional pillars of theory and experimentation, and with data-intensive scientific discovery emerging as a fourth pillar (or fourth paradigm) of science, MetaRx empowers the domain scientist to focus on his/her science rather than the minutia of high-performance computing.