On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 2:10 PM, Sean Seaver <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've been curious if there has been discussion about moving data processing > and refinement to a software as a service (SaaS) deployment. If programs > were web accessible then it may save researchers time and trouble > (maintaining and installing software). In turn, one could then process data > via their iphone. > > The computational demand would be enormous and personally have a hard time > even doing a back of the envelope calculation. The demand could be offset > such as by limiting jobs or the number of users, etc... It will be > interesting to see how mobile plays a role in crystallography. > SBGrid has done something like this for massively parallel MR searches: https://portal.nebiogrid.org/secure/apps/wsmr/ But that's a massively parallel and highly distributed calculation, which isn't what crystallographers do most of the time. Nor do they need to be particularly mobile in an era of remote synchrotron data collection. There would be additional concerns about data privacy - pharmaceutical companies probably aren't going to use such a service, and even some academics are paranoid about letting anyone (including methods developers) see what they're working on. I have a lot of other objections to the idea of doing everything as a webapp, but that's a separate rant. I do, however, like the idea of using multi-touch interfaces for model-building, but you need something at least the size of an iPad for that to be more productive than using a traditional computer with a mouse. -Nat
