Why OpenCB project?

During the last years advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies are producing data at an unprecedented scale, so bioinformatics encounters difficulties in storage and analysis of vast amounts of biological data, so biology has joined big data era and faces new challenges such as the storage, analysis, search, sharing and visualization of data.

Software in Biology lags behind other areas of science both in performance and capabilities. Often in science, software is developed in open comunities, this allows many people to contribute and improve the software. Although several well known and widely used open projects exist in bioinformatics, they are usually focused in one programming language such as Bioconductor or BioPerl. These projects were not designed for new biology challenges, so they show a poor performance and lack many of the new features required today such as High-Performance Computing (HPC) or cloud-based solutions.

New bioinformatic challenges require different advance solutions, therefore OpenCB is not written in one progamming language. Depending on the solution, the best programming language in terms of performance is chosen, for example for data analysis C language and HPC technologies are used, for big datavisualization Javascript and HTML5, and for cloud-based solutions and distributed databases Java is used.