Google organized a conference on cloud computing last week in London. It was called Atmosphere. Google showed their commitment to the cloud by running all the demos live over the Internet and most of the presentations were run live over the web using Google docs. Thanks to Rob Gray for his report.

A primary way that biologists interact with their data is through visualization systems, ranging from simple, stand-alone methods to complex, integrated software packages. However, the sheer volume and diversity of both data and of visualization systems presents an increasing challenge for biologists.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together, for the first time, researchers developing and using systems to visualize a broad range of biological data, including sequences, genomes, phylogenies, macromolecular structures, systems biology, microscopy, and magnetic resonance imaging. In selecting topics for this workshop, we have focused on …

Next-generation DNA sequencing machines are generating an enormous amount of sequence data, placing unprecedented demands on traditional single-processor read mapping algorithms. CloudBurst is a new parallel read-mapping algorithm optimized for mapping next-generation sequence data to the human genome and other reference genomes, for use in a variety of biological analyses including SNP discovery, genotyping, and personal genomics. It is modeled after the short read mapping program RMAP, and reports either all alignments or the unambiguous best alignment for each read with any number of mismatches or differences. This level of …