HPDC-13 The Leading Technical Conference on Grids & Distributed Computing June 4-6 2004 Honolulu, Hawaii USA

   Informatics and Data Integration in Drug Discovery, John Reynders, Celera Corporation

   A foremost challenge for Informatics departments within drug-development companies is the integration of information across disciplines. This talk will describe how Celera has built upon its heritage in managing heterogeneous data at scale to build a constellation of chemoinformatic, bioinformatic, and pre-clinical informatics systems that provide cross-domain data integration and in-silico decision support to scientists.

   PCs for Mere Mortals, Monica Lam, Stanford University

   Why is system adminstration left up to the PC consumers? Failures to perform critical tasks, such as security updates and firewall installations, can open computers up to attacks. Other important tasks such as data back-ups, error diagnosis, and occasional system re-installation, are time-consuming and frustrating to novices not versed in system administration.

   This talk proposes a new system architecture that leverages recent advances in networking and virtual machine technology to shift PC system administration duties back to professionals. In this model, consumers subscribe to collections of software pre-packaged as virtual appliances. These appliances are continually maintained by professionals and delivered transparently to consumers' desktops. We have developed a prototype of such an architecture in a project called the Collective. This talk presents the design of the new architecture and the implementation and experience with our prototype.

updated $Date: 2004/04/07 11:45:52 $ by $Author: rich $