Ever wanted to Google the Human Genome? Well now you can thanks to Amazon.
You've got to hand it to Amazon. They keep coming out with unbelievability cool stuff and the latest is no exception. Called Amazon Public Data sets, it's a cloud data service that provides what they describe as a convenient way to share, access, and use public data within your Amazon EC2 environment. The service enables users to select public data sets are hosted on AWS for free as an Amazon EBS snapshot. Any Amazon EC2 customer can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volume from a publicly shared Amazon EBS public data set snapshot.
The possibilities for the service are tremendous. Think about it, worried about your stock portfolio? No problem, run map/reduce job against various economic databases provided by The US Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The service can enable hobbists to be able to discover increased cancer risks in the human genome. (The nobel prize to goes to Joe in Cincinnati Ohio from his basement) The service enables "anyone" to instantly run analysis against data sets like the Annotated Human Genome Data provided by ENSEMBL.
For the first time in the history of human kind, regular people from home can do the sort of high performance computing that had been previously limited to major governments and corporations. If we are truly in living in the information age, then you can think of this as the information age on steroids, or information age 2.0. I very well might understating this, it is big, very big.
All we need now is a hosted Map/Reduce API for AWS or an AI interface and you've got your very own "Doctor Evil's" world domination cloud kit. It's a brave new world powered by limitless computing power. Welcome to the future folks.
