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In silico research in the era of cloud computing

Nature Biotechnology volume 28, pages 1181–1185 (2010)Cite this article

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Snapshots of computer systems that are stored and shared 'in the cloud' could make computational analyses more reproducible.

Scientific findings must be reproducible for them to be formally accepted by colleagues, practitioners, policy makers and the lay public. Although it was once thought that computers would improve reproducibility because they yield repeatable results given the same set of inputs, most software tools do not provide mechanisms to package a computational analysis such that it can be easily shared and reproduced. This inability to easily exchange the computational analyses behind published results hinders reproducibility across scientific disciplines1.

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Figure 1: Layers of reproducible computing in the cloud.

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Acknowledgements

J.T.D. is supported by the National Library of Medicine Biomedical Informatics Training Grant (T15 LM007033) and A.J.B. is supported by the National Institute for General Medical Sciences (R01 GM079719). We thank D. Singh for valuable discussion regarding cloud-computing technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Joel T. Dudley and Atul J. Butte are in the Division of Systems Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, USA, and at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Palo Alto, California, USA.,

    Joel T Dudley & Atul J Butte

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  1. Joel T Dudley
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  2. Atul J Butte
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Correspondence to Atul J Butte.

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Dudley, J., Butte, A. In silico research in the era of cloud computing. Nat Biotechnol 28, 1181–1185 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1110-1181

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