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From: 5 November 2008 | Time: 15:30
To: 5 November 2008 | Time: 16:30
Location: Hanson Room, Ground Floor, Humanities Bridgford Street Building, The University of Manchester
Organiser:NCeSS
Contact details: Tel: 0161 275 1383Email:frank.odonnell@manchester.ac.uk
Category: NCeSS Seminars » First Seminar Series

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.
The talk will give an overview of the new platform. The Bioceps deployment on The National Grid Service will be demonstrated.

Karim Chine
Karim chine graduated from the French Ecole Polytechnique and TELECOM ParisTech. He worked at Ecole Normale Supérieure-LPS (phase separation in two-dimensional additive mixture), IBM (VisualAge Pacbase), Schlumberger (Over the Air Platform and Web platform for smartcards personalization services), Air France (SSO deployment), ILOG (OPL-CPLEX-ODM Development System), European Bioinformatics Institute (Expression Profiler, Biocep) and Imperial College London-Internet Center (Biocep). He contributed to open source software (AdaBroker) and he is the author of the Biocep platform. He currently works on the seamless integration of the new platform within utility computing infrastructures (Amazon EC2), its deployment on Grids (NGS) and its usage as a tool for education and he tries to build collaborations with academic and industrial partners.