NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Indiana University has received a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a software infrastructure and use cloud computing for a variety of life sciences and genomics data applications, IU said today.
Scientists at the Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center at Indiana University will use the funding in part to expand research begun with funding from the National Science Foundation, which was used to construct an experimental supercomputing network called FutureGrid.
Cloud computing techniques, which outsource computer infrastructure to create virtual supercomputers with enhanced computational powers, may be a useful technology for life sciences research that generates large volumes of data.
"This research is potentially path-breaking," Peter Cherbas, a professor of biology and director of the IU Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, said in a statement.
"Contemporary DNA sequencing machines are churning out data at rates that would have been unimaginable to biologists just a few years ago,” he added. “To use these data — to turn data into some kind of understanding — will demand good tools for using the Cloud and those tools will impact genomics projects worldwide.”