Researchers from the Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center at Indiana University plan use a $1.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health to apply cloud computing to support life science research.

The center plans to explore cloud computing as a way to avoid current computational bottlenecks such as long computation time and large memory requirements, the university said.

The university noted that one focus of the project will be to explore the use of cloud computing for analyzing next-generation sequencing data, which is expected to be generated in volumes "one to two orders of magnitude larger" than possible with current computational capabilities.

The project will involve commercial cloud computing infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other open source software.

"Cloud computing approaches are likely to change the nature of our national research computing infrastructure in the coming years," principal investigator Geoffrey Fox, director of the Digital Science Center and associate dean of research and graduate studies in the IU School of Informatics and Computing, said in a statement.

These technologies "hold significant promise in the life sciences and medical sciences" given their "potential for greater computational power and faster speeds at a lower cost," he said. Fox added that cloud computing is also easier to use than traditional grid computing approaches.

Peter Cherbas, professor of biology and director of the IU Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, is among the center's researchers who will be contributing to the cloud computing research effort.

Since second-gen sequencers are "churning out data at rates that would have been unimaginable to biologists just a few years ago," cloud computing will help manage the data and turn it into understanding, Cherbas said in a statement.

The research team will partner with IU life science research teams to test these techniques in specific research fields such as sequence assembly and population genomics.

Cloud technologies will also be applied to gene family clustering and structural visualization, the university said.

In addition to the NIH grant, the project is supported by an earlier award from the National Science Foundation to construct an experimental supercomputing network called FutureGrid. The total budget for FutureGrid, which involves nine partners besides IU, is $15 million. According to an NSF database, IU has been awarded just over $4 million for that project since 2005.

According to IU's FutureGrid abstract, the team is studying authentication, scheduling, middleware design, interface design, and cybersecurity, as well as optimizing grid-enabled and cloud-enabled computational schemes for researchers in many scientific fields.

FutureGrid will be available to the research community along with user support, so that scientists can submit experiments and have it run through a workflow engine, according to the abstract.

The FutureGrid test bed includes "a geographically distributed set of heterogeneous computing systems, a data management system that will hold both metadata and a growing library of software images, and a dedicated network allowing isolatable, secure experiments," according to the abstract.

Researchers plan to measure the overhead of cloud technology by requesting linked experiments on both virtual and "bare-metal systems," and thus create a platform "that accommodates batch, grid, and cloud computing, allowing researchers to attack a range of research questions associated with optimizing, integrating and scheduling the different service models."

FutureGrid will form part of NSF's TeraGrid high-performance cyberinfrastructure and full integration into the TeraGrid is anticipated by October 2011.