Over the past five to ten years, there have been important advances in data intensive computing, primarily driven by large Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook. Companies such as Google and Yahoo now think of data intensive computing at the scale of data centers instead of clusters and have developed specialized software for managing and analyzing very large datasets. Companies such as Amazon and Microsoft offer what are known as public clouds so that computer infrastructure, ranging from single machines to clusters that contain hundreds of machines can be rented out by the hour. Sometimes the former computing platforms are known as large data clouds and the latter computing platforms are known as elastic clouds. The goal of Core B is to develop a cloud based high performance computing and informatics infrastructure to manage the wide variety of data required for this project and to support the computation of genetic models for complex phenotypes leveraging clinical records, molecular networks, gene-phenotype networks, and pharmacogenomic data.

RELEVANCE (See instructions): This core aims to develop and run a large-scale computational infrastructure—called "cloud computing"—to support large-scale computational inferences about etiology of complex disorders.