Special Issue for Emerging Computational Methods for the Life Sciences Workshop

This paper surveys the contents of the special issue on Emerging Computational Methods for the Life Sciences Workshop with six contributed papers. They cover a rich variety of topics on interface of life sciences and computation which in detail are parallelizing two popular micro array data analysis techniques using the Simple Parallel R Interface (SPRINT); parallelization of PEMer structural variation pipeline and the BWA alignment tool for execution on clusters, grids and clouds using the Weaver/Starch/Makeflow workflow stack; hierarchical MapReduce framework for utilizing computational resources from multiple clusters simultaneously to execute a MapReduce computation across them; framework which can utilize HPC, Grid and Cloud infrastructure through a unified framework to achieve task-level concurrency; port of the AutoDock molecular docking program to run within the open source Hadoop MapReduce framework; current research topics on computational methods of genomics, the complexity of biological applications and computational assays, and the increasing demands of improving algorithms and parallel systems;