What are the risks Dr. Schadt faces by using Amazon for his supercomputing? What are the benefits ?
Alternative mini – assignment 3
THE CASE OF EXTREME SCIENTISTS
Scientists doing research often need serious computing
capability to run simulations and crunch data. Often that meant
working for a large company who could provide the significant
investment in information systems infrastructure. But cloud
computing changed all that. Consider the case of biologist Dr. Eric
Schadt, a researcher who claims that approaches to studying the
complexity of living systems have failed. Studying one gene at a
time do esn’t explain what causes diseases, making it impossible to
find the cures sought by the scientific and pharmacology
communities. Dr. Schadt’s vision is to manage this area of
research, and the large amount of data generated, which appears to
be too much f or any one individual or company to manage, by
creating a human social network. Dr. Schadt believes this
organization reflects the complexity of the living systems he
studies, and therefore it’s necessary to understand it . Dr. Schadt
cofounded a nonprofit organization dedicated to biological research
using an open – source sharing of data, called Sage Bionetworks. He
deeply believes that sharing is the key to finding cures, and
creating drugs, that will combat diseases. And his company has
millions of dollars worth of data from some of the major
pharmaceutical companies to use to begin their research. But by
day, he’s the Chief Scientific Officer of a start – up, Pacific
Biosciences, whose technology helps biologists look a t individual
molecules of DNA in real – time. His job is to work on how to use
this technology for PacBio and to collaborate with others who want
to use this technology for their research. So he travels a lot. But
to do his research, he needs access to the c apacity of a
supercomputer since the amount of data he needs to use for his
research is very large . With the use of the Web, he’s able to do
his work anyplace. Planes are especially favored because he has
significant uninterrupted time.
According to one ar ticle about Dr. Schadt , “He has the same
access to supercomputers that every other American with an Internet
connection and a credit card has. He waits till the plane climbs to
a cruising altitude, then when allowed to use electronic devices,
he uses the p lane’s WiFi to get on Amazon. ”
Dr. Schadt is able to initiate a complex analysis of his data
using Amazon’s services, which crunch the data while Dr. Schadt
flies across the country. When he lands, the analysis is done and
he has the results. This world be equivalent to the computing power
of a scientist working on his company’s multimillion dollar
supercomputer, but in this case, the cost is just a few hundred
dollars . Companies like Amazon.com have become vendors of extreme
computing power. Some have comp ared the amount of computing power
Dr. Schadt uses while flying on an airplane to the amount of
computing power available to a scientist at major pharmaceutical
companies, where they have multimillion dollar supercomputers. With
services like the computing power available in the cloud, Dr.
Schadt may even have more power available to him than the scientist
.
Case Question s Answer the following questions.
1. How would you describe the architecture Dr. Schadt uses to do
his research?
2. What are the risks Dr. Schadt faces by using Amazon for his
supercomputing? What are the benefits ?
3. Advice: If you were advising a company trying to make a
decision about usin g cloud computing for key business
applications, what would you advise and why?
