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Weekly News Digest
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April 2, 2012 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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Complete 1000 Human Genomes Data Free on the Web
Amazon Web Services, LLC (AWS) and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) released the largest catalog of human genetics to the cloud. Researchers worldwide now have instant access to the complete 1000 Genomes Project on AWS, enabling scientists to accelerate disease research. The 1000 Genomes Project is an international research effort coordinated by a consortium of 75 companies and organizations to establish the most detailed catalog of human genetic variation. The project has grown to 200 terabytes of genomic data including DNA sequenced from more than 1,700 individuals. The 1000 Genomes Project aims to include the genomes of more than 2,600 individuals from 26 populations around the world, and the NIH will continue to add the remaining genome samples to the public data set this year. To access the 1000 Genomes Project Data, visit http://aws.amazon.com/1000genomes.“Previously, researchers wanting access to public data sets such as the 1000 Genomes Project had to download them from government data centers to their own systems, or have the data physically shipped to them on discs. This process took a long time, and that’s assuming a lab had the bandwidth to download the data and sufficient storage and compute infrastructure to hold and analyze the data once they had it,” said Lisa D. Brooks, Ph.D., program director for the Genetic Variation Program, National Human Genome Research Institute, a part of NIH. “We are happy that the 1000 Genomes Project data are on AWS to give researchers anywhere in the world a simple way to access the data so they can put the data to work in their research.” Public Data Sets on AWS provide a centralized repository of public data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). The data can be directly accessed from AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). AWS’s highly scalable compute resources are being used to power big data and high performance computing applications such as those found in science and research. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Langone Medical Center at New York University, Unilever, Numerate, Sage Bionetworks and Ion Flux are among the organizations leveraging AWS for scientific discovery and research. AWS is storing the public data sets at no charge to the community. Researchers pay only for the additional AWS resources they need for further processing or analysis of the data. To learn more about Public Data Sets on AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets. Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services—now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. AWS provides a reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government, and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers more than 28 different services. AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, and Singapore. Source: Amazon.com, Inc.
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Brandi Scardilli
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