BaaS - Bioinformatics as a service

Abstract

Genomics and related technologies, collectively known as Omics, have transformed life sciences research. These technologies produce mountain of data that needs to be managed and analysed. Rapid developments in the Next Generation Sequencing technologies have helped genomics become mainstream, but the compute support systems, meant to enable genomics, have lagged behind. As genomics is making inroads into personalised health care and clinical settings, it is paramount that a robust compute infrastructure be designed to meet the growing needs of the field. Infrastructure design to deal with omics datasets is an active area of research and a critical one, for omics to be adopted in industrial healthcare and clinical settings. In this paper, we propose a blueprint for an as-a service compute infrastructure for fast and scalable processing of omics datasets. We explain our approach with help of a well-known bioinformatics workflow and a compute environment that can be tailored to achieve portability, reproducibility and scalability using modern High Performance Computing systems.