Casting a Wider Net: Divining the Future of the Digital Biology

Philip LoCascio
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The  last decade has seen an  unprecedented growth in both the quality 
and quantity of experimental biological  data , and firmly established 
computational biology and informatics as  a critical component of  the
life  sciences.  At  the   heart  of  this   revolution has  been  the
astonishing   maturing of both   parallel   and distributed  computing
technologies    to  permit the   rapid  analysis  and dissemination of
critical information to the biomedical research community.

A focus  within the Life Sciences  division at  the Oak Ridge National 
Laboratory  has been  to develop technologies  that can  be applied to 
large  scale  problems such  as  Whole  Genome and  Proteome analyses, 
Protein Structure  and function  determination, and other  annotations 
that can  accessed transparently  via the WWW  and coupled  with other 
data sources.  The Genomic  Integrated Supercomputing Toolkit (GIST) 
and  the multiple  analyses Pipelines  (GAT,GAP),  form the core  of a 
large  scale annotation and  analysis  environment for both Eukaryotic 
and Prokaryotic  organisms, and continually  being extended  to handle
the  challenges  of  the DOE Genomes   to  Life program.  One  of  the
critical problems  being  addressed is  the management  of large scale
data,  in   coordination  with large  scale   analysis   of increasing
sophistication, and the continuing  need to have access and confidence 
in the reliability of  results. With the  advent  of the large  genome 
sequencing projects, the inherently distributed  nature of large scale
data production  has added   complexity  to  the use  of   distributed
supercomputers , simply in order  to make analysis tractable.

This talk will  focus   on some  existing  large   scale computational
biology technologies, and a number of the biological research problems
that are  being targeted with the   next generation of  algorithms and
computer hardware  being developed, and  will address the preparations 
for the next generation of even larger scale experimental enterprises.