By Matthew Dublin

David Dooling is not having it. In a recent post on his blog, Dooling says enough is enough with all this cloud computing tom foolery that touts the technology as some kind of panacea for life sciences. His understandable frustration at all the hype is directed towards what he dismisses as a "puff" piece by Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing, called "Is the Future Of High- Performance Computing For Life Sciences Cloudy?" Dooling criticizes Stowe's piece for implying that programs which run well on one or ten computers will run well on hundreds of computers-clearly this is not always the case. Another bone to pick is that Stowe fails to make mention of what Dooling feels is the considerable expertise needed to get a cloud up-and-running with a users' desired applications. I would submit that it goes without saying that any broad, sweeping statements about how cloud computing can be a game changer for life sciences penned by someone in the business of selling cloud computing should be taken with several huge pieces of rock salt anyway.

However, this does not mean that an attempt to spread awareness of cloud computing's potential for life sciences, even if does originate from a vendor, is completely worthless. The technology is new, and the more folks in the life sciences community that are aware of its pros and cons, the better. But when trusted publications like Nature Biotechnology seem to be spreading straight up misinformation, the indignation is definitely understandable. Dooling takes apart a recent article in the aforementioned publication entitled "Gathering clouds and a sequencing storm." Among other things, the article contends that "...bioinformaticians might not be willing to spend the time to familiarize themselves with hadoop, the open source program needed to process large data sets on a cloud." I agree completely with Dooling's criticism that it is just plain wrong to say that it's necessary for users to familiarize themselves with Hadoop, let alone even use it to begin with. Not even Google, which uses the Hadoop's precursor Mapreduce, requires users to have an intimate knowledge of Hadoop. For more debunking, go check out the article "Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2009." When is Consumer Reports going to take a stab at cloud computing?...