Research Initiation Award Grant: Advancing Bioinformatics through Services Computing

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Prairie View A&M will engage in a Research Initiation project entitled - Advancing Bioinformatics through Services Computing. With the completion of the human genome, Bioinformatics became a major force to drive the advancement of molecular biology research during the last ten years. Data extracted through advanced techniques, such as Microarray and next-generation sequence machines, are accumulated exponentially. To respond to this challenge, new computer technologies are extensively sought, especially in two major areas, high performance computing and data management. Services Computing, a cross-discipline technology that bridges the gap between business services and IT services, provides a solution to meet those requirements. This project will directly address two problems: provenance management and efficient readmapping algorithm for metagenomics analysis under a Services Computing environment. The goal of this project is to develop a Services Computing based workflow provenance model and a MapReduce based read-mapping algorithm to support the design and execution of interactive metagenomics analysis workflows. Based on the proposed provenance model, interactive and collaborative provenance information can be captured and managed. The proposed suffix index tree based read-mapping algorithm employs the "divide and conquer" mechanism, which significantly reduces the search space, and thus improves the performance of the algorithm. The performance of the algorithm will be further improved by scaling as a cloud computing service using MapReduce framework.The project seeks to 1) develop workflow provenance model which will be incorporated into a scientific workflow system to support interactive bioinformatics workflows and provenance capability; 2) develop a MapReduce based readmapping algorithm to support metagenomics analysis; 3) involve minority undergraduate students in Services Computing and Bioinformatics research; and 4) introduce a new Services Computing course at Prairie View A&M University.