• 7:00pm - Drinks, snacks, and mingling
  
• 7:15pm - Introduction of Karim by Jim and Mike
  
• 8:00pm - Q & A
  

WHAT IS BIOCEP?

Biocep is a new platform for computing and data analysis, based on R, with current deployments on Amazon EC2 and on The British National Grid Service.

Using a rich workbench within the browser, the statistician can now work with an R server running at any location as if it was local to his or her machine. The platform hides the complexity of high performance.

Computing or cloud computing infrastructures and the computational resources are 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. R packages and Java modules can extend the computational capabilities of the server and the workbench's plugins can improve the user-experience and the productivity of the statistician. Biocep provides the required tools to democratize Grid/Cloud Computing and to deal with the data deluge.

The Biocep platform makes distributed computing accessible to a larger number of statisticians. Easy-to-use functions enable the control from within an R session of several R servers running anywhere as additional workers or as clusters to solve embarrassingly parallel problems.

Frameworks for R servers pools' management can be used to develop highly scalable and cloud-bursting-ready data analysis applications in any programming language.

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 statistician can share functions and algorithms as Web Services or as nodes for workflow workbenches. A state is maintained across these nodes and intermediate workflow results are not propagated unnecessarily.

An R server can also be shared: Statisticians and collaborators can connect their workbenches to the same R and analyze shared data collaboratively via a set of broadcasted and high interaction views.

Biocep Project on R-Forge

ABOUT KARIM CHINE

Karim Chine graduated from the French Ecole Polytechnique and TELECOM ParisTech. He has held positions at IBM, Schlumberger, Air France, ILOG, the European Bioinformatics Institute and Imperial College London-Department of Computing.

He is the author of the Biocep platform. His current focus is on cloud computing infrastructures and Biocep's deployment on Grids (NGS, TeraGrid) and its usage as a tool for education. He is seeking collaborations with academic and industrial partners.