[Beowulf] Re: Station wagon full of tapes

[David Mathog]

Chris Dagdigian <dag at sonsorol.org> wrote:

> We are only a few  
> technology revolutions away from these boxes showing up in your point  
> of care primary physician's office (well not really, probably a  
> backend service lab that your physician outsources to ...)

Could be, but this (raw) medical data will not be winging into the
cloud anytime soon because access to patient data is highly regulated.

I agree with most of the rest of your points.  It could be though that
since these high throughput methods tend to come down to "paint these
DNA fragments on the known sequence" that a computational appliance
specialized for this sort of analysis may end up as a sort of front end
to the sequencer, so that DNA goes in one end, the desired result comes
out the other, with the TIFF and other large intermediates never leaving
the room.  This would be especially likely in a clinical environment,
where most of the work would only be for the Human genome.  Admittedly
they might also use these clinical machines to do some pathogen work,
but the bacterial and viral genomes are all very small, relative to the
Human genome.

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech