Can some one please throw some light on cloud facilities available to carry on Bioinformatics work. Also is there a possibility of using such services for free or for a nominal fee, for academic research?
I am working with an HPC cloud that was specifically set up for HPC Bioinformatics work.
http://www.nimbix.net/bioinformatics/
There is a group of us that are building FPGA-based accelerators for bioinformatics work and Nimbix.net is tailored to leveraging these hardware acceleration platforms.
I built several high performance solutions for high throughput sequencing that connects NGS instruments located in a lab to the Nimbix.net cloud.
There are a number of public AMI that are built for genomics, proteomics and general bioinformatics. You can find them at http://www.tnrglobal.com/blog/2009/10/amis-for-bioinformatics-on-aws/. You pay Amazon for the time that they are running. Amazon also gives some grants of credit for use to some academic institutions.
I am not sure exactly what do you mean by "facility" . Do you need specific facilities rather that high performance computing? Cloud just provide you infrastructure, platform and software based on "pay as you use" principle. So whatever is the computational task, you will are able to utilize cloud services on payment. Please narrate your question if you need further guidance.
This response is modified upon Matej comment that corrected me. Thanks Matej
Several National Grid Infrastructuresprovide cloud services (mostly IaaS) for both individual researchers/groups and for national and international research collaborations. They are working with various disciplines, including bioinformatics. Further info on this page: https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Fedcloud-tf:Testbed
The International Conference on Research Infrastructures - ICRI 2012 (http://www.ereg.me/ehome/31679/50320) , featured a posters session with a number of research infrastructures which can support bioinformatics research such as Elixir, BBMRI, Euro-BioImaging, Euro-Virus, Infrafrontier, Instruct, WeNMR, and Venus-C. Depends what you want to do really.
Cloud computing is exactly useful for bioinformatics modelling & applications. Http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/12/1475.full and amazon aws has large public dataset (http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/)
Amazon EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) is one such facility
Can u highlight ur requirements whether it is infrastructure or platform or softwares
Many grid computing facilities also supports bioinformatics domain...One such facility is Indian national grid GARUDA with 70TF computational facilities built by CDAC, Govt of India.
If you need any further details you can send me your mailid or You can refer to its website www.garudaindia.in