%0 Journal Article
%T Cloud BioLinux: pre-configured and on-demand bioinformatics computing for the genomics community
%A Konstantinos Krampis
%A Tim Booth
%A Brad Chapman
%A Bela Tiwari
%A Mesude Bicak
%A Dawn Field
%A Karen E Nelson
%J BMC Bioinformatics
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2105-13-42
%X Cloud BioLinux is a publicly accessible Virtual Machine (VM) that enables scientists to quickly provision on-demand infrastructures for high-performance bioinformatics computing using cloud platforms. Users have instant access to a range of pre-configured command line and graphical software applications, including a full-featured desktop interface, documentation and over 135 bioinformatics packages for applications including sequence alignment, clustering, assembly, display, editing, and phylogeny. Each tool's functionality is fully described in the documentation directly accessible from the graphical interface of the VM. Besides the Amazon EC2 cloud, we have started instances of Cloud BioLinux on a private Eucalyptus cloud installed at the J. Craig Venter Institute, and demonstrated access to the bioinformatic tools interface through a remote connection to EC2 instances from a local desktop computer. Documentation for using Cloud BioLinux on EC2 is available from our project website, while a Eucalyptus cloud image and VirtualBox Appliance is also publicly available for download and use by researchers with access to private clouds.Cloud BioLinux provides a platform for developing bioinformatics infrastructures on the cloud. An automated and configurable process builds Virtual Machines, allowing the development of highly customized versions from a shared code base. This shared community toolkit enables application specific analysis platforms on the cloud by minimizing the effort required to prepare and maintain them.High-throughput genomic technologies continue to move in a direction where data yield from the instruments is increasing, while the cost for acquiring the technology is continuously decreasing. For example, the introduction of benchtop genome sequencers such as MiSeq from Illumina [1], has made complete sequencing of viral, bacterial, and small fungal genomes affordable to small laboratories. Nonetheless, acquiring the sequence is only the first step, and
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/13/42