Overview

JCVI Cloud BioLinux image enables scientists to quickly provision computation infrastructures supporting bioinformatics using cloud computing platforms such as Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus.   Upon deployment users will have instant access to a host of software including BLAST, glimmer, hmmer, phylip, rasmol, genespring, clustalw, the Celera Assembler, and the EMBOSS collection of utilities.  JCVI Cloud BioLinux is built on a 64-bit instance of Ubuntu virtual server customized with bioinformatics packages from the BioLinux repository, and will be updated periodically.

This image is meant to be a community resource. As such, we look to the community for suggestions on tools and software for incorporation, as well as general feedback or ideas that will enhance the value of the image to the entire community.  To maximize this effort, we will be crowd sourcing and using forums to gather feedback, respond, and implement features.  Please visit our User Voices forum for details (or click the feedback tab to the left).

Motivation

Many bioinformatics workflows involve large datasets in which high performance computing is needed. This moves the burden to the individual scientist for provisioning the computational infrastructure and technical expertise in order to setup and use the software for their research and storage needs. Cloud computing can provide researchers with the ability to perform computations using a practically unlimited pool of virtual machines, without facing the burden of owning or maintaining any hardware infrastructure. One of the major vendors of compute clouds is Amazon Web Services, which is based on the same infrastructure that powers the Amazon.com e-commerce website and executes millions of customer transactions monthly.

Vision

The vision for JCVI Cloud BioLinux is to offer a base image of genome analysis resources for cloud computing platforms, such as Amazon EC2.  This Science as a Service model (ScaaS) will allow JCVI to incorporate, develop and optimize life science software as well as supporting data sets on compute clouds.  This project is driven by the observation that commonly-used bioinformatics tools are hard to build and maintain, require high amounts of resources, or just too numerous to choose from.

JCVI AMI on SourceForge

Getting Started

Bio-Linux

Email: cloud(AT)jcvi.org

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