BGI Announces Cloud Genome Assembly Service

I am very excited about cloud solutions for de novo assembly as they are quite computational intensive and with parameters tweaking, you have a massive parallelization  problem that just begs for computer cores. I do wonder if there's a need for a cloud solution for resequencing pipelines, especially when it involves BWA which can be run rather efficiently on desktop or in house clusters. Only whole genome reseq might require more compute hours, but I would think that any center that does WGS regularly would at least have a genome reseq capable cluster at the very minimum to just store the data before it is analyzed.

Anyway let's see if BGI will change the computational cloud scene ...


By Allison Proffitt 
July 6, 2011 | SHENZHEN, CHINA—At the BGI Bioinformatics Software Release Conference today, researchers announced two new Cloud-based software-as-a-service offerings for next-gen data analysis. Hecate and Gaea (named for Greek gods) are “flexible computing” solutions for do novo assembly and genome resequencing.  
These are “cloud-based services for genetic researchers” so that researchers don’t need to “purchase your own cloud clusters,” said Evan Xiang, part of the flexible computing group at BGI Shenzhen. Hecate will do de novo assembly, and Gaea will run the SOAP2, BWA, Samtools, DIndel, and BGI’s realSFS algorithms. Xiang expects an updated version of Gaea to be released later this year with more algorithms available.  .......full article