Symposium "Cloud Computing in Life Sciences"

Due to the importance of technologies for distributed computing and storage in our field, we invite for a one-day symposium on "Cloud Computing in Life Sciences". This event will give an overview about the current status of these "buzzword" technologies in real life, and will introduce examples of resources, software, tools and pricing models in that area. Furthermore, selected pilot projects using cloud techniques in life sciences will be presented. This focus on "applied" cloud computing will make this event interesting not only for specialists but for all researchers in Computational Life Sciences.

When: Monday, Nov 21, 10.15-16.00

Where: Seminar room 2D404, UZA2, Althanstr. 14, 1090 Vienna

Registration: Free of charge, but please register here to help us planning.

Program

10.15-10.20
Begin and Welcome by the Research Focus "Computational Life Sciences" of the Faculty of Life Sciences

10.20-11.20
Dr. Lars Gustav Malmström, ETH Zurich
Cloud and grid computing in protein structure prediction
- Why low-resolution modeling
- Genome annotation using Rosetta
- Using cloud to combat pathogenic bacteria
- Using chemical crosslinks to aid the modeling.

11.20-11.35
Coffee break

11.35-12.35
Benedikt Wachinger, Helmholtz-Center Munich
Big Data in the Cloud -- and its Applications in Biomedical Text Mining
In the first part of this talk, I will give an overview of the different cloud computing technologies and trends currently employed in the industry. With examples I will introduce the key concepts of cloud computing and explain two core technologies used at the Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at the Helmholtz Centre in Munich, Eucalyptus and Hadoop. In the second part, I will introduce our text mining system, Excerbt, which is built from the ground up onto these technologies. Finally I will address the question of when to use cloud computing and when traditional solutions might be more reasonable.

12.35-13.30
Lunch buffet

13.30-14.30
Ivona Brandic, TU Vienna
Self-adaptable, energy efficient Clouds
Cloud computing is a promising technology for the realization of large, scalable, and on-demand provisioned computing infrastructures. Currently, many enterprises are adopting Clouds to achieve high performance and scalability for their applications while maintaining low cost. Service provisioning in the Cloud is based on a set of predefined non-functional properties specified and negotiated by means of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Cloud workloads are dynamic and change constantly. Thus, in order to reduce steady human interactions, self-manageable Cloud techniques are required to comply with the agreed customers’ SLAs. In this talk we discuss flexible and reliable management of SLAs, which is of paramount importance for both Cloud providers and consumers. On the one hand, the prevention of SLA violations avoids penalties that are costly to providers. On the other hand, based on flexible and timely reactions to possible SLA violation threats, user interaction with the system can be minimized enabling
Cloud computing to take roots as a flexible and reliable form of on-demand computing. Furthermore, a trade-off has to be found between proactive actions that prevent SLA violations and those that reduce energy consumption, i.e., increase energy efficiency. We utilize our infrastructure for the efficient execution of RNA-Seq data analysis and report first experimental results.

14.30-14.45
Coffee break

14.45-15.45
Dr. Wibke Sudholt, CloudBroker
Biological computations in the cloud using the CloudBroker Platform
In this talk, it is shown which possibilities the cloud offers for biological computations, and how the CloudBroker Platform can help to realize these. As particular example, a project together with ETH Zurich and IBM to model 3D structures of proteins using the Rosetta software is discussed.
Demo of the CloudBroker Platform
In this demo, a short overview is given how to work with the CloudBroker Platform. In particular, it is shown how to offer and execute applications using computer resources in the cloud.

15.45-15.50
Concluding remarks and end of the meeting

This symposium is organized by the Research focus "Computational Life Sciences" of the Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Vienna. We thank IBM and CloudBroker for their support!