06/28/2010
Advancing Cooperation for DOE’s Biological Research
Summary
A critical obstacle to progress in systems biology research for biofuels and other DOE missions is the difficulty of sharing data across large interdisciplinary teams of scientists. Now a new capability, the Systems Biology Knowledgebase pilot cloud computing system (called kandinsky in honor of the poineering abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky), has become available to the research community. Kandinsky provides a computational environment designed for biological researchers to integrate, store, and analyze heterogeneous yet correlated data. It supports a new paradigm in computational data sharing, the open source Hadoop cloud computing architecture. It is similar to what is found in commercial applications such as Amazon or Google, but is designed specifically for scientific research applications. Guidelines for accessing this machine and additional information can be found from the website. The system was purchased under the project award entitled Knowledgebase R&D to Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.