Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: Minisymposium Abstract

Abstract

The fast development of new experimental biotechnologies has resulted in an avalanche of genomic data. As a consequence, the life sciences are becoming more quantitative, and information technology, mathematics and statistics are being incorporated in a natural way. New fields such as bioinformatics and computational biology have emerged and are now key players in the effort to unravel the information hidden in the genomes. With the vast and ever growing amounts of data, it has become necessary to employ parallel programming, and grid techniques to accelerate the data processing and analysis. Although the bioinformatics and computational biology fields are still in their infancy when it comes to using parallel computers and grids, at least compared to other fields such as computational chemistry and physics, they have already emerged as major users of high-throughput computing resources.