Computing infrastructure for bioinformatics web services

生物信息学是计算机科学领域，旨在解决与分子生物学数据分析相关的计算问题。我们的团队在开发新的算法和机器学习方法方面有着长期的记录，这些方法用于基因组的注释、跨物种的序列比较以及从序列预测结构。它还开发了几个在该领域非常受欢迎的数据库。为了最大限度地发挥所开发方法的影响，必须通过易于使用的网络服务提供工具，生物学家可以上传数据进行分析，并获得详细的结果，而不必在自己的机器上安装任何软件。在过去的几年里，我们团队为建立这样的网络工具而共同努力。然而，运行这些Web服务的计算服务器不足以满足需求，这使得我们无法发布新工具，也无法不受限制地访问现有工具。

Bioinformatics is the area of computer science that aims at solving computational problems linked to the analysis of molecular biology data. Our group has a long track record of developing new algorithmic and machine learning approaches for the annotation of genomes, the comparison of sequences across species, and the prediction of structure from sequence. It also has developed several databases that are highly popular in the field. To maximize the impact of the approaches developed, tools must be made available via easy-to-use web services where biologists can upload data for analysis and get back detailed results without having to install any software on their own machine. Our group has made concerted efforts to build such web tools over the course of the past few years. However the computing servers on which these web services are running are insufficient to answer the demand, which prevents us from releasing new tools and from giving unrestricted access to existing ones.