QuantMS - Has proteomics (re)discovered the Cloud?

 

I often make this joke that if it looks like I'll go a month without getting a paper accepted, I'll just find the nicest dataset that one of you have put out here and I'll reprocess it on a computer with more than 4 cores using something called "the Cloud", find what you missed, and - violin! - new paper! If you haven't heard of "the Cloud" chances are you're in proteomics. "The Cloud" is when you log into someone else's huge ass computer and use loads and loads of resources for a short period of time. Then you can do crazy stuff like process a file in 10 seconds - or 5 minutes, if you want to do something stupid like take the time to look for 300 PTMs and using a database of every known human genetic variant.  

Sure screws up my plans (and the plans of 10 recent big $$ startups that have basically the business model of "searching proteomics data with 'The Cloud' to actually see what is in those files) if y'all all start using real computers.... 

Booo....

Wait. 

When do you ducking sleep, yo? It's like trying to keep up with James Fulcher or Amanda "35 published papers before I got my PhD" Smythers. Absurd level of productivity out of people who aren't anywhere near as old as the clip I made that meme from....

Anyway, check out the Cloud thing above. If anything, it'll give me less reasons to make fun of our community to outsiders.

If you can't wait, or if that requires you to know code, the way I use the Cloud is to pay $20/file (might be my academic discount and I pay for 150 files at a time, so I might get a bulk discount) to OptysTech to use their Cloud computing platform, Bolt. You can pay extra for informatics support which gets you pretty cleaned up reports. I should put up an additional disclaimer (in addition to the ones over there ---> ) that the CEO of OptysTech is a long time friend of mine and we were awarded a grant from NCI that ran from 2018-2020. I'm just a paying customer these days, but that sounds like a conflict of made up blog rules to me.