PDCCB 2012 - Parallel and Distributed Computing Challenges in Bioinformatics

One of the goals of the special issue is to discover how the bioinformatics scientific community is trying to take advantage of a variety of modern high-end parallel and distributed architectures. High-throughput DNA sequencing, gene expression analysis, protein folding, and sequences alignment have led to an exponential deluge in the amount of biological data, which in turn are geographically spread in several laboratories and data repositories. There is a tremendous potential for end-users and researchers to conduct large-scale computations on distributed resources by using a combination of the following technologies:
Distributed middleware for connecting data/cluster computing centers: this includes Grid computing middleware for user authentication and accounting, remote job submission, resource scheduling/reservation, and data management and MapReduce implementations
Virtualization technologies capable of providing on-demand application-specific execution environments: this involves a style of computing, cloud computing, in which on-demand resources are provided as a service over the Internet
Production grids have been successfully used; cloud computing is emerging, enabling convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Relevant work discussing life sciences/bioinformatics problems requiring parallel/distributed computing challenges to be solved will also be considered, if a clear description of why current infrastructures and sequential implementations are not enough is provided, along with what scientific (biological/biomedical) impact and advances would be possible exploiting state-of-the-art computing. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
Parallel algorithms for bioinformatics applications using MPI and/or OpenMP
GPGPU parallel algorithms for bioinformatics applications using OpenCL or CUDA
Exploiting modern parallel architectures including FPGA, many-core processors, multicore processors
Grid/cloud Infrastructures for bioinformatics data analysis and management
Grid/cloud-based applications in the life sciences
MapReduce-based parallel bioinformatics applications
Workflow applications in distributed environments
Grid/cloud computing infrastructures, middleware, and tools for bioinformatics
Grid/cloud computing bioinformatics services
Security and privacy preserving in bioinformatics grids/cloud
Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/abi/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable:
Manuscript Due Friday, 11 May 2012
First Round of Reviews Friday, 3 August 2012
Publication Date Friday, 28 September 2012