Title
Case Report: A High Productivity/Low Maintenance Approach to High-performance Computation for Biomedicine: Four Case Studies
Abstract
The rapid advances in high-throughput biotechnologies such as DNA microarrays and mass spectrometry have generated vast amounts of data ranging from gene expression to proteomics data. The large size and complexity involved in analyzing such data demand a significant amount of computing power. High-performance computation (HPC) is an attractive and increasingly affordable approach to help meet this challenge. There is a spectrum of techniques that can be used to achieve computational speedup with varying degrees of impact in terms of how drastic a change is required to allow the software to run on an HPC platform. This paper describes a high-productivity/low-maintenance (HP/LM) approach to HPC that is based on establishing a collaborative relationship between the bioinformaticist and HPC expert that respects the former's codes and minimizes the latter's efforts. The goal of this approach is to make it easy for bioinformatics researchers to continue to make iterative refinements to their programs, while still being able to take advantage of HPC. The paper describes our experience applying these HP/LM techniques-in four bioinformatics case studies: (1) genome-wide sequence comparison using Blast, (2) identification of biomarkers based on statistical analysis of large mass spectrometry data sets, (3) complex genetic analysis involving ordinal phenotypes, (4) large-scale assessment of the effect of possible errors in analyzing microarray data. The case studies illustrate how the HP/LM approach can be applied to a range of representative bioinformatics applications and how the approach can lead to significant speedup of computationally intensive bioinformatics applications, while making only modest modifications to the programs themselves.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1197/jamia.M1571
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
12
1
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1067-5027
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
13
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nicholas Carriero12469475.93
Michael V. Osier2284.18
Kei-hoi Cheung366460.65
P L Miller444593.86
Mark Gerstein535445.41
Hongyu Zhao685089.39
Baolin Wu742943.39
Scott Rifkin821.31
Joseph T. Chang961.21
Heping Zhang1000.34
K. White1110111.43
Kenneth Williams1200.34
Martin H. Schultz1336644.76