Summary: John Fonner is part of the Life Sciences Computing Group at TACC, and Rion Dooley manages the web and cloud services group plus he leads the Agave API project. Fonner and Dooley present a hands-on four-hour workshop for South by Southwest Interactive on Tuesday, March 17th. It's called Science as a Service and other Lies: Hacking Big Data on the Web. In the podcast they discuss science-as-a-service. Rion Dooley: When we talk about science as a service, what we're really talking about is the ability to think about your science and interact with your data and with your experiments in a way that is thinking in terms of the problems you're trying to solve rather than the machines you're trying to solve them on. John Fonner: The domain field is a patchwork of individual codes out there that have very specific assumptions about the type of system that you're running them on. The types of algorithms might have very different hardware requirements. And the data volumes now for a lot of the next-generation sequencing questions are just huge. We want to talk about the tools that we have and the way that we've been tackling this problem and really taking it from a place that is inaccessible to most biologists and only accessible to the most technically savy scientists, and putting it in a place where pretty much anyone can have access to it.
