The data in question comes specifically from the Institute for Systems Biology-Cancer Gateway in the Cloud (ISB-CGC) – part of the US National Cancer Institute’s Cloud Resources. The NCI created Cloud Resources so that scientists wouldn’t have to download and store extremely large datasets. With the ISB-CGC on Google Cloud, two researchers developed a set of Google BigQuery user-defined functions (UDFs) to perform statistical tests on breast cancer data. Using the UDFs, analysis that would have taken days with an on-premise program took just minutes to complete. The researchers – Dr. Kawther Abdilleh, lead bioinformatics scientist at General Dynamics Information Technology, and Dr. Boris Aguilar, a senior research scientist at ISB – have now made their UDFs available to other researchers via BigQuery. “We are spreading the message of the cost-effectiveness of the cloud,’’ Abdilleh said in a statement. “With Google Cloud’s BigQuery, we’ve successfully demonstrated that researchers can inexpensively analyze large amounts of data and do so faster than ever before.”
