Exhibits, Demos & Posters
Biocep, Towards a Federative, Collaborative, User-Centric, Cloud-Ready and Grid-Enabled Computational Open Platform
Authors
- Karim Chine
Abstract
With Biocep, we propose to build on top of R—the highly popular statistical environment, an open platform for computing and data analysis. Using a rich workbench within the browser, the e-researcher can now work with an R server running anywhere as if it was local to his machine. The platform hides the complexity of high performance computing or utility computing infrastructures and the computational resource is abstracted with a simple URL. The R server can be running near the large files to be analyzed or within the database where the terabytes of data to mine are stored, the R packages can extend the computational capabilities of the server and the workbench’s plugins can improve the user experience and the productivity of the e-researcher: Biocep provides the required tools to democratize high performance computing and to deal with the data deluge.
The new platform makes distributed computing accessible to a larger number of e-researchers. Very easy-to-use functions enable the control from within an R session of several R servers running anywhere as additional workers or as a cluster to solve embarrassingly parallel problems.
The new platform widens the scope of the computational research resources that can be easily shared. Besides the interoperable software components, the R packages, the e-researcher can share functions and algorithms as Web Services or as nodes for workflow workbenches. An R server can also be shared: e-researcher and collaborators can connect their workbenches to the same R and analyze shared data collaboratively via a set of broadcasted and high interaction views.
