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Dennis Gannon, a computer scientist at
Indiana University in Bloomington,
knows all about bringing huge amounts
of computer power to bear on complex scientific
problems. He has at his disposal, for the
purpose, Big Red, one of the world’s largest
supercomputers, right there on the campus.
But when Jong Youl Choi, a graduate student
computer scientist at the university, approached
him with a bioinformatics program that he
had written, Gannon suggested they run it
on Amazon’s EC2 Beta program, as translating
it for Big Red would be too time-consuming.
Last year, the Seattle-based e-commerce
firm introduced a ‘cloud-computing’ option
that provides access to an ever-expandable
‘cloud’ of powerful computer servers. Gannon
and Choi set up three virtual computers and
uploaded their program, which seeks matches
for an unknown protein sequence from a massive
national database. The job
took about 15 minutes and cost
them less than US$2.00.
“It was easy,” Gannon says.
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