Hadoop's Rise in Life Sciences
By now the ‘Big Data’ challenge is familiar to the entire life sciences community. Modern high-throughput experimental technologies generate vast data sets that can only be tackled with high performance computing (HPC). Genomics, of course, is the leading example. At the end of 2011, global annual sequencing capacity was estimated at 13 quadrillion bases and growing rapidly1 . It’s worth noting a single base pair typically represents about 100 bytes of data (raw, analyzed, and interpreted).