XSEDE15

Biologists are increasingly becoming users of national computational resources, and NSF has taken steps to actively encourage this movement. This increase is driven and enabled by advances in genomics sciences, which has flourished from recent and rapid improvements in DNA sequencing technology, the so-called Next Generation Sequencers (NGS). Genomics sciences include everything from simultaneous genomic examination of complex bacterial communities, to medically motivated personal and cancer genomics. For many biologists, NGS has allowed them to obtain genomic and transcriptomic data for their non-model organisms.
 
However, this abundance of data has confronted biologists with big data and computational barriers; at the same time, national resources—such as those provided by XSEDE or the Open Science Grid (OSG)—are being under-utilized by biologists. Many XSEDE-provided resources are working diligently to support this community of scientists and their changing cyberinfrastructure needs.
 
This Birds of a Feather session welcomes all attendees of XSEDE ‘15 who are—or would like to—providing support to the biological sciences, especially in the realm of genomics. This session will be moderated by Drs. Thomas Doak, a genome scientist and manager of the National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS), and Philip D. Blood, Senior Computational Scientist, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Both institutions provide XSEDE resources supporting a large community of genomics researchers.
 
IU participants will kick off the BOF by relaying the results from two recent surveys of NCGAS users and NSF-funded researchers. Topics for discussion will include bioinformatics software management and providing access through web-based workflow tools, but any topic is fair game. The session’s goal is to have a fun and open discussion of challenges and approaches to serving biologists with national cyberinfrastructures.