INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
During a recent discussion about bio sequencing, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg questioned why cloud computing costs have become so
expensive.He specifically called out Amazon's cloud computing service, AWS and suggested it might be a good idea to call up Jeff Bezos to
discuss the issue further.Back in 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife Pricilla Chan founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and the Chan
Zuckerberg Biohub with the aim of using technology to advance research into health, social and scientific issues.During a live chat on
Facebook, which was moderated by Zuckerberg, the research center's co-presidents Dr
Stephen Quake made the point that scientific progress is often impeded by the high costs of cloud computing services.Zuckerberg explained
that the Biohub's high AWS bill is often discussed in its meetings, saying:"In our bio board meetings, one of the things we talk about is
the cost of the compute, and our AWS bill, for example, is one of the specific points
Let's call up Jeff and talk about this
It's interesting, the bottleneck for progress, in medical research at this point, a lot of the cost for it, is on compute and the data side
and not strictly on the wet labs or how long it takes to turn around experiments."The Biohub receives billions of dollars in funding from
Facebook but LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is also a big contributor. Other organizations and research labs around the world aren't so
lucky when it comes to investment though and Dr
Quake explained that the high costs of cloud computing services are often a barrier that many are unable to overcome, saying:"This is no
more apparent than in the developing world or low-income resource settings
The cost of the sequencing and the lab work has gotten to the point where you can do this almost anywhere in the world
The compute to be able to analyse that data is unfortunately not available to the vast majority of the people that do that
It's very often the case that you'll go to one of these low-income resource settings, they'll have a sequencer but its collecting dust
because they can't compute
Even if they can access the cloud, they can't afford it."Governments may need to eventually convince cloud providers to lower their costs if
live-saving advancements in medicine and research are to continue.Via Cloud Pro
