What is the attraction of cloud computing for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute?
Coates: We have these very ‘spiky,’ very agile, very diverse workloads. We get ambushed when data arrives with very little notice. So one of the things we’ve been looking at is, can we use the cloud as emergency compute? Also, the cloud as a remote data store is interesting—we’ve got so much important data now that we need to think about data recovery and continuity. Traditionally we stuck things on tape and sent them to a warehouse or bunker somewhere. But the economics of doing that on tape now don’t stack up. If it goes into the cloud, we can do really cheap long-term data storage because of economies of scale. Third is data sharing. We’re a net data exporter—we make all our data publicly available. But getting to it on a remote network is quite difficult. We collaborate with BGI-Shenzhen on the 1000 Genomes Project data, but moving those data backwards and forwards without resorting to a truck full of hard disk drives is difficult. If we need to make data available, do we park it i
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- What is the attraction of cloud computing for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute?
