Workshop on Clusters, Clouds and Grids for Life Sciences

Event Dates

May 16, 2022 - May 19, 2022

Location

Taormina - Sicily - Italy

Submission Deadline

Feb 11, 2022

Digital transformation is in full progression in worldwide healthcare and life sciences, leading to creation, storage and processing of massive amounts of health related data. Artificial intelligence and Big Data Analytics have been established in bioinformatics and biomedical research and are increasingly reaching healthcare with certified clinical decision support systems and smart health apps. Besides stablished fields like molecular dynamics, genomics or neuroimaging now many other medical domains rely heavily on large scale computational resources.

The emerging new methods need to manage Tbytes or Pbytes of data with large-scale structural and functional relationships, TFlops or PFlops of computing power for simulating highly complex models, or many-task processes and workflows for processing and analyzing data. On the other hand, they need to provide interaction with highly distributed user landscapes, such as actors of primary care, hospitals and increasingly the patient itself Today, many areas in Life Sciences are facing these challenges, such as biomodelling, predictive models of disease and treatment, evolutionary biology, medical biology, cell biology, biomedical image processing, biosignal sensoring or computer-supported diagnosis.

This new situation demands appropriate IT-infrastructures, where biological and medical data can be processed within an acceptable timespan – reaching from minutes in health-care applications to days in large-scale research projects. Distributed IT-systems such as Grids, Clouds, Fogs and Big Data Environments are promising to address research, clinical and medical research community requirements. They allow for significant reduction of computational time for running large experiments and for speeding-up development time for new algorithms. Furthermore, they can increase the availability of new methods for the research community and reduce barriers for large-scale multi-centric collaborations. However, specific challenges in the employment of such systems for biomedical applications – such as security, reliability and user-friendliness – often impede straightforward adoption of existing solutions from other application domains.

This workshop aims at bringing together developers of bioinformatics and medical applications and researchers in the field of distributed IT systems. It addresses researchers who are already employing distributed infrastructure techniques in biomedical applications as well as computer scientists working in the field of distributed systems interested in bringing new developments into the biomedical area. The goals of the workshop are to exchange and discuss existing solutions and latest developments in both fields, and to identify the remaining challenges. The workshop further intends to identify common requirements to lead future developments in collaboration between Life Sciences and Computing Sciences. It aims to explore new ideas and approaches to successfully apply distributed IT-systems in translational research, clinical intervention, and decision-making.

Contributions accepted for CCGrid-Life 2022 are invited to submit an extended version to the Special Issue in Future Generation Computer Systems (Impact Facctor 7.1) FCGS – LIFE2022

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

Full papers or Posters describing contributions to the following topics:

Detailed application use-cases highlighting achievements and roadblocks

Exploitation of distributed IT resources for Life Sciences, HealthCare and research applications, for example medical imaging, disease modeling, bioinformatics, Public health informatics, drug discovery, clinical trials

Service and/or algorithm design and implementation applicable to medical and bioinformatic applications

Improved energy consumption of bioinformatic applications using clouds

Modeling and simulation of complex biological processes

Genomics and Molecular Structure evolution

Molecular Dynamics

Clouds for big data manipulation in bioinformatics and medicine

Ontologies and biomedical text mining

Biological data mining and visualization

Machine Learning in biomedical data analytics

Deep learning experiences in Life Sciences

Error handling and fault tolerance

Distributed and heterogeneous bioinformatic and medical data management

Big Medical and Bioinformatic Data applications and solutions

Data privacy, security and access control

Development environments for distributed bioinformatic applications

Programming paradigms and tools for bioinformatic applications

Scientific gateways and user environments targeting distributed medical and bioinformatic applications

Interoperability for exchanging data, algorithms and analysis pipelines

Committees

Program Committee

Jesus Carretero, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain

Vladimir Korkhov, St. Petersburg State University, Russia

Scott Emrich, University of Tennessee, USA

Julian Kunkel, Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen, Germany

Tram Truong-Huu, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Kary Ocaña, National Laboratory of Scientific Computing, Brazil

Alban Gaignard, CNRS, France

Sandra Gesing, University of Illinois Chicago, IL, USA

Dagmar Krefting, University Medical Center Göttingen, Germany

Daniel de Oliveira, Fluminense Federal University, Niterói, Brazil

Tristan Glatard, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Afonso Duarte, Agency for Clinical Research and Biomedical Innovation, Portugal

Arrate Munoz-Barrutia Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

Bruno Schulze LNCC/MCT, Brazil

Ivan Merelli Institute for Biomedical Technologies – National Research Council, Italy

Silvia D. Olabarriaga, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Organizing committee

Jesus Carretero, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain

Dagmar Krefting, University Medical Center Göttingen, Germany

Sandra Gesing, University of Illinois Chicago, IL, USA

Silvia D. Olabarriaga, AMC/ University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Jesus Carretero (jesus.carretero@uc3m.es) or Dagmar Krefting (dagmar.krefting@med.uni-goettingen.de)