Virtualization-based applications for cloud computing in biomedical research

The project will involve research and development of new technology for distributed computation, with a focus on applications in computational biology and bioinformatics as routinely encountered in our own lab. This research will be conducted using Copper, GridCentric’s grid computing platform, which is based on a previous research system developed at the University of Toronto called Snowflock. Snowflock/Copper allows highly flexible and dynamic use of computer hardware resources by rapidly creating identical copies of virtual machines configured to work in parallel on distributed workloads. Our project is expected to generate results in systems software research which will be of direct relevance to the technical advancement of GridCentric’s products. In addition, the project will involve real-world case studies in our computational biology lab which may be leveraged to build products better targeted at customers in related fields, both academic and commercial.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Michael Brudno

Student:

Joseph Whitney

Partner:

GridCentric Inc.

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of Toronto