Microsoft joins bioinformatics

Submitted by flipe on

As I had previously quoted about Google, big companies from Computer technology and Internet fields, also contribute to research; even, in Bioinformatics.
It's several years since IBM started funding a Computational Biology Center in their Watson research centers.
Now, it seems that Microsoft, according to what I read in Nodalpoint, also joins in this world.
Luckily, in Bioinformatics field, as it is logical if you analize it historically, open code and publication are in good position and getting better and better.

Ciència i tecnologia
In English
Microsoft
bioinformatics

Comments

Anònim's picture Anònim replied on

Thank you for providing a translation of the original post. I found the original via a reference to nodalpoint, but I had no luck with the bable fish translation service.

I agree that open code and publication are the core principles that drive scientific research forward. However some quotes from this article on Microsoft's entry into cluster computing are interesting. The following is on why one group chose windows clusters:

"[I] wanted someone else's butt on the line if software didn't work," says David Lifka, chief technology officer of the CTC. "We had a [level of support] with proprietary Unix." When moving off these Unix systems, "we didn't want to have to go to a news group or pay extra for this [support],"

In my experience it takes days to resolve problems with proprietary hardware (i.e. the time it takes to call the company, arange a time for the service call, travel delay...). However with open source solutions, a locally knowledgeable engineer and access to mailing lists etc. fixes can be much quicker.

I was originally going to post this link on nodalpint as a follow up to the Microsoft in bioinformatics story. Unfortunately the server that hosts nodalpoint was cracked last week. Hopefully we'll be back some time next week, cross fingers.

-- Greg Tyrelle (http://www.nodalpoint.org/)

Anònim's picture Anònim replied on

Showing my ignorance: no wonder the bable fish Spanish->English translation didn't work. The post is written in Catalan ?

toniher's picture toniher replied on

Hello Greg, thank you for this interesting piece of information. Congratulations for Nodalpoint initiative and I also wish to have it back soon.
Most of this site is written in Catalan, you can read about as well in Wikipedia and Ethnologue.
In the upper left part of the weblog there are some flags linking to automatic translation engines. Spanish and French translations, since they are similar to Catalan, are quite good; but English one is far from optimal :-(