Thursday, March 29, 2012

Amazon Ties With NIH on Genomics Research Effort

Seattle-based Amazon Web Services, the web services arm of Amazon.com, said today with the United Stations National Institutes of Health (NIH), that the two have collaborated on publishing a major human genetics database on the web. The services said that it has published the complete 1000 Genomes Project via AWS, making it the largest collection of human genetics information available to researchers worldwide. Amazon and the NIh said that the database includes more than 200 terabytes of genomic data, including DNA from more than 1,700 individuals. That data is being used for disease research. Amazon has tapped its Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for storing the data, which can then be used by researchers on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR).