Cloud Computing and Parallel Strategy for Bioinformatics: A Review

This paper provides an overview of the application of cloud computing in certain bioinformatics tasks. Current bioinformatics applications demand both management of huge amounts of data and intensive computation. Cloud computing provides a promising new approaches for bioinformatics tasks that leverage the hardware and software investments on large scale data centres. In this paper, first of all, different bioinformatics tasks are described along with their basic features, such as gene sequence analysis, gene mapping, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) fragment assembly, gene finding, microarray analysis, gene regulatory network analysis. The relevance of using parallel strategy and cloud programming models to these problems is then mentioned. These are followed by different applications in cloud computing, along with their merits, for addressing some of the aforesaid tasks. Comparable performance and efficiencies for the applications have been exhibited in cloud service based utility and the managed parallelism. Finally, some limitations of the current research activity are provided. An extensive bibliography is