CCGrid-Life 2015 - Workshop on Clusters, Clouds and Grids for Life Sciences

In the last 20 years, computational methods have become an important part of developing emerging technologies for the field of bioinformatics and biomedicine. Research areas such as biomodelling, molecular dynamics, genomics, neuroscience, cancer models, evolutionary biology, medical biology, biochemistry, biophysics, biotechnology, cell biology, nanobiotechnology, biological engineering, pharmacology, genetics therapy, or automatic diagnosis, rely heavily on large scale computational resources as they need to manage Tbytes or Pbytes of data with large-scale structural and functional relationships, TFlops or PFlops of computing power for simulating highly complex models, or many-task processes and workflows for processing and analyzing data.
This new situation demands appropriate IT-infrastructures, where bioinformatic and medical data can be processed within an acceptable timespan - reaching from minutes in health-care applications to days in large-scale research projects. Large-scale distributed IT-systems such as Grids, Clouds and Big-Data-Environments are promising to address research, clinical and medical research community requirements. They allow for significant reduction of computational time for running large experiments, for speeding-up the development time for new algorithms, for increasing the availability of new methods for the research community, and for supporting large-scale multi-centric collaborations. However, specific challenges in the employment of such systems for bioinformatic applications such as security, reliability and user-friendliness, often impede straightforward adoption of existing solutions from other application domains.
This workshop aims at bringing together developers of bioinformatic and medical applications and researchers in the field of distributed IT systems. On the one hand, it addresses researchers who are already employing distributed infrastructure techniques in bioinformatic applications, in particular scientists developing data- and compute-intensive bioinformatic and medical applications that include multi-data studies, large-scale parameter scans or complex analysis pipelines. On the other hand, it addresses computer scientists working in the field of distributed systems interested in bringing new developments into bioinformatic and medical applications.
The goals are to exchange and discuss existing solutions and latest developments in both fields, and to gather an overview of challenges (technologies, achievements, gaps, roadblocks). The workshop further intends to identify common requirements to lead future developments in collaboration between Life Sciences and Computing Sciences, and to collaboratively explore new ideas and approaches to successfully apply distributed IT-systems in translational research, clinical intervention, and decision-making.