Systems for the Management of Pharmacogenomic Information

Recent breakthroughs in biological research have been made possible by remarkable advances in high-performance computing and the establishment of a highly sophisticated information technology infrastructure. This chapter gives an overview of the main and most important technologies needed for the management of pharmacogenomic information, namely database management systems and software and hardware architectures. Because pharmacogenomics deals with a great many of public and/or proprietary data, the most prominent ways for easy storage, retrieval, analysis, and exchange are presented. Processing these data requires the use of sophisticated software architectures. Several most recent practices useful for a pharmacogenomic environment are explained. Multitiered application design and web services are discussed and described independent of the major enterprise development platforms. Because life sciences are becoming increasingly quantitative and because state-of-the-art software architectures use many system resources, this chapter presents the most recent and powerful systems for parallel data processing and data storage. Finally, shared and distributed memory systems and combinations of them as well as different storage architectures such as directly attached storage, network-attached storage, and storage-area network are explained in detail.