About Us

While our research efforts in biocomputing date back to 2002 (specifically, our mpiBLAST tool), the impetus for pulling together all of our biocomputing research into this space originated from our initial "Compute the Cure" for Cancer Award from NVIDIA Foundation in 2011. This work then led to a NSF Computing in the Cloud grant that targeted data-intensive biocomputing in the cloud. The intent of this project was to accelerate and "cloud"-ify the genome analysis tools, which identify mutations that occur in the genome and could lead us to understand what biological pathways are defective. This, in turn, could lead us to understand what pathways might have brought the cancer on. The major artifact from this project was SeqInCloud, which we demonstrated on the Microsoft Azure cloud and which led to a series of worldwide Microsoft Cloud commercials [30-sec] [90-sec]. Like all of our biocomputing research, we are working towards making this tool freely available to the public [GitHub] [Azure (soon)].

The above is merely one approach towards helping to "compute a cure" for cancer. There are many other such approaches and tools, both clinically and computationally, that strive toward this goal. We invite you to explore the computational approaches and tools that we have made available here as well as to collaborate and contribute towards making these approaches and tools better, whether through intellectual contribution or monetary contribution.

News & Highlights

• Cloud Commercials: Our modest initial efforts towards computing a cure for cancer, which ran worldwide from February to August 2015: [30 sec commercial] [100-sec commercial]

• Microsoft Case Study: Transforming life-science research with a Big Data solution in the cloud [video]
• HPCwire: The democratization of parallel computing
• Virginia Tech: Parallel computing for the masses
• TEDxVirginiaTech: Big Compute vs Big Data