Workshop on Clusters, Clouds and Grids for Health

Biomedical Clouds and Biomedical Data Commons And Why They Are Changing Health Care Research

Abstract

As biomedical datasets continue to grow in size, biomedical clouds and commons of biomedical data are beginning to play an important role in the research community. We survey some of the recent developments in the field and discuss some important technical challenges. In particular, we discuss some of the ways that biomedical clouds are beginning to interoperate. We also discuss some of the lessons learned over the past couple of years as we operated the petabyte-scale Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud (PDC), which contains data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

About Robert Grossman

Robert Grossman is the Chief Research Informatics Officer and a faculty member in the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. He is also the Director of the Center for Data Intensive Science (CDIS) and a Core Faculty and Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute and the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology. He is the Founder and a Partner of Open Data Group, which specializes in building predictive models over big data for companies, and is the Director of the not-for-profit Open Cloud Consortium, which provides cloud computing infrastructure to support researchers. He has led the development of open source software tools for analyzing big data, cloud computing and high performance networking. He is the Director of the Open Science Data Cloud, a petabyte-scale science cloud for managing, integrating, analyzing, and sharing datasets in science, medicine, health care and the environment. More information about him can be found at his web site rgrossman.com.