Amazon Web Services offers access to Human Genome Data, labor statistics and more

Sindya Bhanoo — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:53:52 -0800

Amazon Web Services is lending a hand to researchers and developers by hosting a centralized repository of public data and the computing power to crunch the data.

As with other Amazon Web Services tools, users can easily access it online and will only pay for the computing power and storage they consume. By increasing the number of people who have access to large data sets, Amazon hopes to level the playing field between larger companies and organizations and smaller ones.

The public data sets helps "make it possible for our customers to be successful based on their ideas, not on their resources," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services, in a press release.

Data sets that are currently available include Human Genome data, several years of United States Census Data and labor statistics.

"Public Data Sets on AWS will enable me and many of my colleagues to collaborate with each other by sharing our commonly used data sets, research environments and tools," said Dr. Peter Tonellato from the Harvard Medical School in the press release.

"I only pay for the compute time I use, and more importantly I can spend more time focusing on research, not downloading and setting up computational infrastructure," he added.

Amazon Web Services is an example of cloud computing. By providing online processing power, storage, and now, access to large data sets all via the Internet, Amazon is helping small companies build scalable businesses and products inexpensively.

To see a full list of public data sets that Amazon has made available, click here. TechCrunch reported that other companies, such as Swivel, are also trying to provide access to large public data sets.

(photo by ynse)

The Industry Standard - Amazon Web Services offers access to Human Genome Data, labor statistics and more - Comments

Amazon Web Services offers access to Human Genome Data, labor statistics and more