Figure 3.

The 'new' genome informatics ecosystem based on cloud computing. In this model, the community's storage and compute resources are co-located in a 'cloud' maintained by a large service provider. The sequence archives and value-added integrators maintain servers and storage systems within the cloud, and use more or less capacity as needed for daily and seasonal fluctuations in usage. Casual users continue to access the data via the websites of the archives and integrators, but power users now have the option of creating virtual on-demand compute clusters within the cloud, which have direct access to the sequencing datasets.