The National Cancer Institute is asking the research community for its help in developing public cancer knowledge clouds composed of data repositories and computational resources that will make it easier for researchers to access and analyze cancer genomics data.
In a letter soliciting advice from the community, the NCI said that it plans to conduct a series of pilots in order to determine how best to implement cloud-based infrastructure to support the biomedical research community.
To that end, it is asking researchers to provide information about situations where limitations in information technology capabilities either prevented or slowed the pace of their research; their experiences with using high-performance computing environments for biological research; and metrics that could be used to evaluate the success of the pilots.
Interested parties are asked to send their responses to [email protected] by May 3, 2012.
A copy of the letter is available here.