Figure 1.

The old genome informatics ecosystem. Under the traditional flow of genome information, sequencing laboratories transmit raw and interpreted sequencing information across the internet to one of several sequencing archives. This information is accessed either directly by casual users or indirectly via a website run by one of the value-added genome integrators. Power users typically download large datasets from the archives onto their local compute clusters for computationally intensive number crunching. Under this model, the sequencing archives, value-added integrators and power users all maintain their own compute and storage clusters and keep local copies of the sequencing datasets.