The distribution of large biological datasets from UK to China

Beijing, 19-20 October 2009

The size of the bioinformatics databases has been increasing exponentially in the last ten years. Some core resources are approaching, or already reached, multi-terabytes in their size. This trend of growth is accelerated in the recent years by the introduction of new data types and high-throughput data production technologies. On the other hand, databases are playing more and more crucial roles in life science researches and discoveries. To reach the most update data becomes the necessity for the success of many research projects. It has become the fundamental requirement for bioinformatics centres, such as EBI, to acquire and distribute large data sets timely and efficiently from/to collaborators and users across the continents.

Objectives:

1. To review and seek the most advanced technologies available, and find solution(s) to address the ‘distribution problem’ facing to biology domain.

2. To bring network specialists from EBI, relevant UK/EU projects and Chinese key network service providers together, to optimize the current network configuration, and raise the awareness in their future planning.

3. To form potential collaboration with one or two Chinese bioinformatics service centres to conduct research and development in addressing common challenges in very large databases.

The workshop will be by invitation only. If you are interested in participating please contact Weimin Zhu. To register please click here.

Agenda

Sponsors: Research Councils UK China Office.