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Serverless Nanopore Basecalling with AWS Lambda

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Computational Science – ICCS 2021 (ICCS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12743))

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Abstract

The serverless computing paradigm allows simplifying operations, offers highly parallel execution and high scalability without the need for manual management of underlying infrastructure. This paper aims to evaluate if recent advancements such as container support and increased computing resource limits in AWS Lambda allow it to serve as an underlying platform for running bioinformatics workflows such as basecalling of nanopore reads. For the purposes of the paper, we developed a sample workflow, where we focused on Guppy basecaller, which was tested in multiple scenarios. The results of the experiments showed that AWS Lambda is a viable platform for basecalling, which can support basecalling nanopore reads from multiple sequencing reads at the same time while keeping low infrastructure maintenance overhead. We also believe that recent improvements to AWS Lambda make it an interesting choice for a growing number of bioinformatics applications.

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Acknowledgments

The research was supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education as a part of the CyPhiS program at the Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland (Contract No. POWR.03.02.00-00-I007/17-00) and by Statutory Research funds of Department of Applied Informatics, Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland (grant No. BK-221/RAu7/2021).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Informatics, Silesian University of Technology, ul. Akademicka 16, 44-100, Gliwice, Poland

    Piotr Grzesik & Dariusz Mrozek

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  1. Piotr Grzesik
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  2. Dariusz Mrozek
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland

    Maciej Paszynski

  2. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany

    Dieter Kranzlmüller

  3. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Valeria V. Krzhizhanovskaya

  4. University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Jack J. Dongarra

  5. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter M. A. Sloot

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Grzesik, P., Mrozek, D. (2021). Serverless Nanopore Basecalling with AWS Lambda. In: Paszynski, M., Kranzlmüller, D., Krzhizhanovskaya, V.V., Dongarra, J.J., Sloot, P.M.A. (eds) Computational Science – ICCS 2021. ICCS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12743. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77964-1_44

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77964-1_44

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-77963-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-77964-1

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